The short films will be like a "sustainable development train" that travels to every station in cities and villages, continuing the power of tech for good. The short film content will also partner with CCTV News and CCTV public service channel for co-creation and broadcasting. Our ultimate goal is to produce a series of stories that accumulate SSV's efforts.

The Challenges

Left-behind children are a widespread social pain point in rural China. Due to parents having to migrate to cities for work, they have no choice but to leave their children in hometowns to be taken care of by elders. Remote mountainous areas also have education problems, and government-dispatched urban teachers going to rural areas to teach is time-limited. Most children see these city teachers as parents, so accompaniment is an urgent issue needing to be solved for left-behind children. Tencent thus developed digital education, not only providing equipment in rural elementary schools, but replicating the sustainable development model of online teaching to over 30,000 villages. Because digital education aligns with national policy, Answer Me succeeded in partnering with CCTV News, becoming the first free video aired on a national channel. This was an unprecedented achievement.

China's CCTV news channel, as well as its public service channel, is a content-driven program. Left-behind children and rural education are issues that the Chinese government is most interested in addressing.

This 10-minute film, to be broadcast on this program, was already planned in 2020, and it took us two years of collecting interviews and precipitating the birth of this film.

Answer me. The story kicks off with this one sentence.

A kid you thought was a born liar is questioned by his teacher, why lie? Why did he steal the cell phone?

It's a story about left-behind children, lacking companionship, who, when faced with separation, have to steal to get the attention of the adults. Rural teachers, every adult, come and go for a short period of time just to get their internship diploma. Whereas what children want is daily companionship, the irony is that every volunteer teacher who is about to leave, who is not deceiving the children with lies.

In the face of this dilemma, Tencent chose to answer the public with digital teaching to solve the problem of lack of teaching resources in remote mountainous areas. Maybe the method is not yet perfect, but it is right to do it consistently.

Tencent Sustainable Social Value Organization aims to practice Tencent's mission of "Tech for Good". In three years, this organization has implemented multiple sustainable development cases and it hopes to tell users through short films. The short films will be like a "sustainable development train" that travels to every station in cities and villages, continuing the power of tech for good.

Creative Insights

The simple greeting "See you tomorrow" became an unbearable lightness between rural teachers and left-behind children. "Promise" is an important answer in this drama, not just from teachers to children, but from Tencent SSV to society regarding rural education issues. Although digital teaching cannot solve all educational problems, it is better than nothing for now. We have built a bridge. So "see you tomorrow"!

The video was based on a true story. We interviewed ten groups of rural teachers and principals, and shot on location at Mingtian Elementary in Lijiang, Yunnan. With the brand video series on the sustainable train, we plan to produce authentic brand stories over five years. Partnering with CCTV News and using a cinematic style, the video straddled documentary and realism. We hope in five years to edit it into a retrospective show on Tencent Video, presenting SSV's stories of sustainability.

Results and Impact

Total online views exceeded 8.7 million. Weibo topic exposure reached 150 million+. Through quality content, we leveraged free broadcasting by CCTV News and propagation by multiple industry accounts, Tencent News, Tencent Video, etc. The content ranked among the most popular on Bilibili, with over 700,000 views and nearly 70,000 engagements across two videos - active, positive comments. Xinpianchang held the top 1 total ranking for two consecutive weeks.