New Rotary Int’l president seeks to enlarge Chinese membership

Gary Huang

The new president of Rotary International (RI), Gary C. K. Huang, the first RI president of Chinese descent from Taiwan, visited Macau last week and met local officials, as well as his fellow Rotarians in the region.
During a meeting with media last Thursday at Venetian Macau, Mr Huang revealed that he is planning to boost the number of Chinese speaking Rotarians. The president is also hopeful that, after the long-term effort of RI, the World Health Organization (WHO) can declare the world polio-free in 2015.
Gary Huang said that, due to the regulations in mainland China, there are currently only two mainland Rotary Clubs in Beijing and Shanghai, with each of them having 50 to 80 members.
“Due to the legal issues in mainland China regarding assembly, [the government] still does not allow local Chinese to register [for a civil group]. People have to own a foreign passport, including Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore identification documents, before they are allowed to join,” the president explained.
He claimed that the mainland authorities have acknowledged the charitable works of the Rotarians. “[The officials told us] to continue to do more acts of charity and let more people know about us,” Mr Huang said.
The president stressed that RI is a law-abiding organization. Therefore, it plans to establish more clubs in the mainland that are only open to people with non-Chinese citizenship.
He revealed that some Rotarians in cities like Tianjin and Zhuhai have also started gathering to discuss possible future charity projects, although the official clubs are yet to be established.Gary Huang said that RI is optimistic about the future development of Rotary in the mainland.
Moreover, the president is looking into including Chinese as one of the official languages of RI. Since one of the requirements of adding a new official language is to have more than 45,000 Rotarians who speak that language, Mr Huang is planning to enlarge the Chinese speaking membership.
Currently, there are around 35,000 Rotarians, including those from Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese-speaking communities throughout the world, who speak Chinese. The president aims to boost the number to 45,000 this year.
Gary Huang explained that when the Chinese language starts to appear in RI’s publications and in the organization’s meetings, it will attract more Chinese-speaking individuals to become Rotarians, speeding up the growth of the membership in general.
Furthermore, Gary Huang said that RI has put a huge effort into eradicating polio. After 28 years of work, there are currently only three countries that have new polio cases of no more than 500 in total per year. “Therefore, WHO is very approving of our works and it is very possible that polio free will be declared next year. We hope that, after three years of monitoring, we can completely eradicate polio by 2018.”
He expressed his wishes that Rotarians, especially those in Macau and Hong Kong, can continue supporting RI in this “final battle” against polio.
In addition, Mr Huang has mentioned the development of the Rotary clubs in Macau. He said that although there is not a great number of Rotarians in Macau, there is the potential for membership growth here, given the size of the population.
He also revealed that he met the Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture, Cheong U, who thanked Rotary for its contribution to the city and is looking forward to more collaborations.

João Pedro Lau