Insight from Shanghai, China.

It’s easy to get lost in Shanghai, virtually and psychologically. My first memories of Shanghai are the bright lights that illuminate its skyline at night, pedestrians piling every street and corner, and the endless rows of cars racing back and forth across lane lines. With skyscrapers on nearly every block, the city itself is a labyrinth and it’s nearly impossible to not lose one’s way. However, one can also get lost in another sense as we indulge ourselves in Shanghai’s modernity, wealth and fast lifestyle.

Surrounded by luxuries of every kind, it is easy to completely forget about China’s record of human rights abuses, flawed legal system, and income inequality. It is easy to overlook the people living in the margin of Shanghai’s advancements. Behind the tall skyscrapers are run-down tenements that are easy to miss as we instead gape at the unique and innovative designs of modern architectures.  Beyond the façades of high GDP growth and fancy restaurants is a stark underside: people living in the margin of Shanghai’s advancement, normal citizens barely eking out a living, struggling to keep up with the growth of modern Shanghai.

The Bund is perhaps Shanghai’s most popular tourist attraction. Tourists and locals alike crowd the walkways to catch a view of the beautiful skyline in Pudong, Shanghai’s financial district. Cameras flicker every other second as families and friends pose for pictures with the infamous Oriental Pearl Tower in the background. The lively environment can easily allow one to overlook the young migrant workers that fill the benches of the Bund after ten PM. These workers, usually youths in their late teens and early twenties, came to Shanghai from rural areas to look for work. However, they soon find that work is not so easily found nor is housing in Shanghai very affordable. They also face legal challenges as China’s hukou system (a household registration system) makes it nearly impossible for migrant workers to gain residency in another city after leaving home. Even university students like my language partner from Hubei cannot attain a Shanghai hukou. The rigidity in the system leaves room for much inequality.

One of the most unforgettable conversations that I had in Shanghai was with a professor. This professor teaches Political Science. Having recently taken a class on Chinese politics and governance at the UW, I was excited to consult this professor and to hear his perspective on matters pertaining to Chinese governance. Everything he told me was more or less what I expected to hear, but hearing it from someone who lives and works in China gave me a very fresh perspective.

The professor was candid and acknowledged the flaws in the Chinese systems. He told me stories of his colleague being arrested for conducting a research around AIDS patients, a subject considered too sensitive for Chinese officials. Fortunately, this colleague was released on bail, though not without extensive warnings from the government.

Then there is the notion of quantity over quality. I told the professor that from my experience in Shanghai, I grasped a sense that ‘face value’ seems to matter more than the actual intrinsic value. This is especially apparent from the contrast between outdoor and indoor lighting. Skyscrapers and many shopping buildings were covered with gorgeous lights on the outside of the buildings, yet many buildings that I’ve entered are dimly lit on the inside. In Seattle, it was the exactly opposite. Our skyscrapers are rarely lit aside from the light emanating from offices.

The professor confirmed my theory that the Chinese value ‘face’ or ‘mianzi.’  He told me that such was the same in the Chinese education system. Chinese students are required to take an excessive number of classes every semester, with some taking up to 8 to 10 classes.  The rationale for this, according to the professor, is because of the perception that the number of courses students take represents the wide range of knowledge that students are required to learn. However, many of these students are overloaded with work and do not have time to build comprehensive understanding of any subject matter. Consequently, according to the professor, breadth without depth can do more harm than good. Students leave their classes without substantial knowledge of the subject.

This conversation with the professor showed me the underlying problems in China’s education system, one that is rarely portrayed in Chinese media. Of course, while the professor is more educated than the average Chinese and had been educated in the United States, which had substantially influence his perspective on these matters. The average Chinese citizens, on the other hand, are not as concerned as they are too busy concentrating on making ends meet. This group includes my co-workers at my internship. They epitomize the average Chinese who are neither at the higher tier nor the lower tier of the income strata.

~~~~~

Binh Vong is a junior in the International Political Economy track of the Jackson School of International Studies and is also majoring in Political Science and Chinese. She is currently a member of the Jackson School Journal Editorial Board.

This past summer, Binh studied Business Chinese at Shanghai Jiaotong University and interned at China Telecom through a Columbia University administered program.

Insight from Quilpué, Chile.

As the product of the Jackson School, which encourages its students to be “global citizens” and “critical thinkers” regarding issues on the world agenda, I have not been able to help but analyze my surroundings here in Chile with a corresponding mindset. Past academic courses touching on the familiar themes of economic growth, development, industrialization, protecting indigenous rights, among others, have all subtlety influenced the way I view my surroundings here in Chile. The main impetus to writing this piece was the desire to understand “development” from a variety of angles and viewpoints. Along these lines, by way of my current position teaching English in Chile, living with a host-family, casually conversing with people in my town regarding the quotidian matters impacting the lives of ordinary, every-day people, I have been afforded the unique opportunity to gain an on-the-ground perspective of development to contrast with my previous assumptions, the majority of which have been fostered through reading numerous articles and books on the subject.

A prime example that immediately comes to mind comes from earlier this year with one of the students in my ‘English Club’ elective. In preparation for the Chilean Ministry of Education’s English Opens Doors debate initiative we held informal discussions covering a wide range of topics. After posing a question to my kids regarding charities and foundations and their role in impactful change in places like Africa, the topic of discussion eventually steered into territory more relevant to my students: what does it mean to be a Third World, developing country? Taking the question a step further, I asked them about their thoughts on Chile, and whether or not they viewed it as a first world, industrialized country. One student quickly responded without hesitation; “I think Chile is definitely a Third World country.”  Amidst head-nods and what seemed to be resounding agreement from the others in the group, he proceeded to explain his rationale.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure how to react. After two years of solid immersion in all things ‘Global Development’ during the latter half of my university stint, I had come to not only associate the term ‘Third World’ with the abject poverty seen in the shanty-towns of Africa, India and Southeast Asia, but also as a term that had lost some of its relevance and could no longer be used to classify countries in the modern, post-Soviet era. Even more so, in preparation for my trip to South America, I had been quite adamant about doing my homework and reading the associated literature. Thus, after some pretty hefty research regarding Chile’s current and future economic prospects, its inclusion as the first Latin American country into the Anglo-Saxon-dominated OECD, as well as high rankings in terms of democracy, rule of law, and business-friendly infrastructure conducive to foreign direct investment, I was operating under the assumption that Chile had realized the elusive ‘pinnacle’ of development, one which is set out and perpetuated by an intricate system of lending and indebtedness between creditors such as the World Bank, Regional Development Banks, industrialized countries, and their debtor counterparts in the rest of the world (the majority of which lay south of the equator). However, after a few months in-country, my current viewpoints have deviated slightly from those I was harboring at the outset.

After stumbling upon this revelation, I began to view my surroundings differently. Starting with my own backyard – Quilpué – the town in which I’m currently living has plenty of industry, exemplified by a bustling city center and pockets of noticeable wealth in a few neighborhoods; yet, it also has more than its fair share of poorer, destitute sectors which comprise a sizable part of the outlying metro area. I’m now reminded of this on my walk home from work every day, where I pass El Retiro, one of the nicer, safer neighborhoods of the city lined with aesthetically-pleasing houses, manicured lawns, and expensive, foreign-manufactured cars in the driveways only to walk a half a kilometer further and see rows of rinky-dink shacks lined up near a small stream, bordering the countryside and number of abandoned warehouses.

Beyond the intra-city level, another aspect which has caught my interest is the relationship between Santiago, the sprawling, capital-city metropolis and the rest of the country. If one were to create a “Development 101” course, included in the curriculum would certainly be the relationship between a country’s administrative center, or its core, and the rest of the country, often referred to as the periphery. The idea is that as a country begins to develop its industry and advance its economic prosperity, inevitably certain demographics begin to benefit more than others, and a disparity in wealth and income distribution occurs. More often than not, pockets of wealth accumulate in the larger centers of industrialization and commerce, i.e. cities, while rural areas are generally omitted from this progress.

Now, I would be among the first to say that any economic progress, albeit only in certain areas, is better than absolute poverty all around. Especially with the proper political institutions in place, this new economic capacity could effectively be leveraged in order to redistribute wealth in a more equitable fashion. However, this theory usually remains a theory, and looks entirely different in operation. In the case of Chile, Santiago has become a bastion of finance and commerce, and accordingly, has become the gateway for foreign capital not only into Chile, but the whole of South America. Buoyed by copper exports, the Chilean economy has managed to utilize a surplus in its natural resource sector to diversify other sectors of its economy, most notably financial services and materials & processing. As such, the Chilean economy has a low level of unemployment and growth prospects that would make any European periphery country green with envy. However, the reality of the white-collar executive in Santiago is not necessarily the same as the fisherman in Coyhaique, and what may be beneficial for the former may not be for the latter.

This is where the oft-heard phrase in development literature comes into play: “Industrialization and its Discontents.”  Although I personally am of the belief that industrialization is a crucial element of economic growth, and that the entire doctrine of modern capitalism implies that there will be winners and losers in any case of even slight economic progress, as it is this competition between firms and companies that creates the foundation for growth, and maintains market efficiency. And, I firmly believe that it is the government’s role to manage and oversee the economy in a way that mitigates any possible negative externalities associated with the free-market capitalist model. The universal solution to this has been the creation of the modern welfare state: however, within the parameters of this essay, I’d like to focus on the protection of environmental and indigenous rights. In Chile, there is at present an overwhelming detachment between what is happening in Santiago and what is happening in the rest of the country, namely rural areas with special neglect of the Chilean South. Currently, Chile has seen a wave of protests with the slogan “Patagonia Sin Represas,” a movement which has materialized in order to challenge a motion to build a sprawling network of five hydroelectric power plants in one of the most ecologically, environmentally, and culturally significant places on earth. The HidroAysén project has been fully endorsed by the current administration led by President Sebastian Piñera, which helped to facilitate a joint-venture between Endesa, the Spanish-Italian energy conglomerate, and Colbún S.A, a Chilean utility company to secure the necessary investment and capital to finance the project. On one end, the project will supposedly help maintain Chile’s current rate of economic growth by providing the necessary energy infrastructure needed to support said growth; on the other hand, a number of studies point out that it will very likely displace thousands of nearby indigenous, fishing, and agricultural communities, as well as have dire consequences for the swath of Chilean Patagonia in which it is being constructed.

I will be the first to stand by the importance of a “pro-business” mindset in advancing the livelihood of a country and its citizens. I do maintain the belief that the concept of finance does in fact serve an invaluable role in allocating capital efficiently across market segments to provide support and enable firms and companies to grow and achieve larger scale.  However, the realm of finance often does not adequately take into account the real world outside equity markets, with a precedent that encourages managers to pick securities and shares which maximize returns for investor portfolios whether or not the returns come at the expense of a minority group or a nature reserve that exist outside this realm. As far as “socially-conscious investing” is concerned, a friend and past colleague of mine has summed up the idea quite aptly in his blog, where he states that in spite of an investor’s abstinence from buying shares in companies whose operations negatively impact the environment, the void will inevitably be filled by other investors in the market. This is due to the fact that “markets are typically very efficient, and unless everyone works together to withdraw financing from ‘unethical’ firms, those who don’t care will arbitrage their share price back up to where it was before socially conscious investors withdrew their capital.”

In addition, I politically consider myself as a left-leaning moderate, and before coming to this country, would never in a million years have thought myself to be falling on the socialist end of the political spectrum. Basically, the fact of the matter is that many Americans in the current day are a bit hesitant to refer to themselves as socialists.  However, I have noticed that the variation of the ideology that exists here, Socialism “a la Chilena,” along with the country’s current model for economic and social development is less about radical, Marxist-style income re-distribution utopianism, and more about a sort of moral and economic fairness.

To conclude, I would like to point out that on the whole, Chile has made great strides in overcoming a brutal dictatorship, adopting a pro-growth economic model and providing appropriate political institutions to support it. All of this can be noted in the country’s past three decades of positive growth in Real GDP and GDP-per capita, both of which have resulted in improved living standards for many Chileans and a robust middle-class which increasingly enjoys more influence in the country’s political agenda. However, despite these notable improvements, creating tangible solutions for extending the benefits of this growth to the country’s poor remains a large-scale issue. As a result, Chile must address its underlying political and social problems moving forward before we go ahead giving it our unrelenting praise.

~~~~~

Julian Fellerman graduated in the summer of 2011 with a degree in International Studies (Development Track). He has complemented his studies with internships at the U.S. Department of Commerce-Export Assistance Center and the Global Indexes Group at Russell Investments. While at Russell, he was part of a team that produced the Russell Indexes Country Guidebook, a semi-annual report which outlined the macroeconomic and investment landscape for developed and emerging countries in Russell’s indexes.

He is currently a volunteer with the Chilean Ministry of Education/UN Development Programme initiative, English Opens Doors, where he teaches primary and secondary-level English at Colegio Montesol, a semi-private school located in Quilpué, Chile. He wrote this piece for a blog he is keeping chronicling his experiences in the Southern Cone.

Insight from Yangjuan, China.

Previously on the Cool  Mountain Educational Fund blog as: We’re making a difference; Three future teachers; and 113,000 RMB in scholarships find grateful recipients.

Thus far in 2012, I have taken several trips to China as part of my work as head of the Cool Mountain Education Fund, a non-profit organization working to support education in Nuosu Yi communities in China.  The Cool Mountain Educational Fund works to increase enrollment of graduates from Yangjuan Primary School, way up in the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, in middle school, high school, college, and trade schools.  To do this, we provide scholarships to all qualifying students.

In April of this year, I was joined by Sichuan University Students and UW exchange members Zhang Yin and Huang Wenlan for a 3-1/2 hour bus ride through lush and drizzly Sichuan countryside, on a freeway so smooth I could write in my field notebooks on the ride, to Deng Xiaoping’s hometown of Guang’an, where we arrived around noon to find Yangjuan graduates Qubi Lisan, Ma Xiaoyang, and Li Musa waiting for us at the bus station; we hopped a city bus to the College, not far out of town, where we had lunch at a little restaurant outside the campus gate, and caught up with the students’ doings.

All of the boys are in three-year credential programs, studying to be elementary teachers.  Lisan wants to teach English, Musa early childhood education, and Xiaoyang art.  They had all recently passed their first-year qualifying examinations with no trouble, and the next hurdle was a test of pronunciation and grammar in the Standard Chinese language known as Putonghua (ordinary speech) in China and Mandarin outside.  They had gained an enormous amount of confidence since I had known them back in their middle-school days, and it seemed to me they were going to be a credit to their ethnic group and their village.  In addition, studying to be a teacher is, I think,  not just a matter of job security, but a way of giving back to the community and the schools that had enabled them to come this far.

After lunch, we toured the campus, dominated by a statue of Deng Xiaoping on a high pedestal.  The boys said several times that it was too bad we didn’t have more time; they would have liked to go with us to Deng’s birthplace, which is now a local museum, which they have visited twice already.  And rightly so; if it were not for the visionary program of reform that Deng set out for China in the 1970s and 80s, it would have been very unlikely that Xiaoyang, Musa, and Lisan would have been able to go to college.

Still, for Xiaoyang’s family in particular, college expenses are almost prohibitive.  Lisan’s and Musa’s fathers are both township officials, so they are not feeling the economic pinch of college as acutely as Xiaoyang’s family is, though our scholarships still help.  But consider that these boys have expenses, including tuition, room and board, food, and transportation home for vacations, that amount to about 11,000 or 12,000 yuan (between $1,700 and $19,00) per year. Xiaoyang’s father Labbu, whom I have known for a long time, is an ordinary farmer in Yangjuan, though endowed with special skills in the old Nuosu art of felt-making.  In recent years, he and his older son Muga have been traveling to big cities, including Beijing, to work on construction projects. Together, they can probably net enough to cover Xiaoyang’s college expenses in a half-year’s work, but of course they have other expenses as well.  Muga was seriously injured three years ago by a falling crowbar, but he is now back to work. Xiaoyang told me that his father had insisted that Xiaoyang come along to Beijing last summer and work construction with them. It was incredibly tiring, he said, much more so than the farm work he has been doing after school and during weekends and vacations since he was a little boy.

As my old friend Scott Rozelle, a Stanford economist, argues, one of the biggest challenges facing China in the next decade will be the ability to keep its working-age population employed, given that its labor costs are rising and that the multinational businesses that have turned to China as “the world’s workshop” in the last 20 years will soon be taking their business elsewhere, to places where wages remain cheap. When this happens, China will need to have a workforce educated well enough to make them worth the $10 an hour wages that they will be demanding.

This coming wage crisis, he said, is exacerbated by the fact that China’s social and economic inequality is rising: the latest estimate of the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality ranging from 0 for the most equal societies to 1.00 for the most unequal, is .50, very high by world standards. He emphasized that the countries that have “graduated” in the last three decades from middle-income status (where China is now) to high income status–including Taiwan, South Korea, Portugal, Greece, and others, have all had Gini coefficients below 40, and most of them below 35. China’s is not only high, but increasing, and the biggest factor in the increase is the widening gap not just between cities and countryside, but also between rich rural areas (mostly in the coastal provinces, but also in certain inland places such as the Chengdu Plain) and poor rural areas, which contain about 22% of China’s population. And one of the biggest elements of the inequality between rich and poor rural areas is in education. Whereas over 40% of elementary graduates in China’s cities now attend either four-year colleges or state-accredited junior colleges, in the poor rural areas, the ratio is only 2%. In other words, a child graduating from the sixth grade in a poor rural area has only one-twentieth the chance of attending school enjoyed by her urban counterpart. If she is going to have a job in China’s future high-wage, high-skilled economy, we have to increase her chances of getting a higher education.

The Baiwu Valley where Yangjuan School is located is, of course, part of a poor rural area; the whole county of Yanyuan is an officially designated poverty county. So it is really noteworthy that of the 34 children who graduated in Yangjuan’s first class, in 2005, 15 tested into four-year or junior college programs, and 12 of those are attending college right now. In other words, Yangjuan graduates have a record of college attendance comparable with children from an urban elementary school, far, far better than could be expected from a school in a poor rural area, let alone one in a poor, minority rural area.

How much of this is due to our efforts is a matter for us or others to research. But the preliminary conclusion is that we are, indeed, doing some good.

In August, I returned to China, where I spent five days from August 21 to 26 meeting with former Yangjuan Primary School students, their teachers, and parents, consulting with dear colleagues Li Xingxing and Jacques Duraud and, as a climax, awarding increased scholarships to 23 current college students and over 70 high school students, as well as giving token congratulatory awards to this year’s sixth-grade graduates who are proceeding to middle school this week.

I arrived in Chengdu a little after midnight on the night of August 20th-21st, and didn’t get to bed until almost three, yielding a less-than-comfortable prospect for a long drive to Yangjuan the next day. I met Li Xingxing outside the Sichuan University gate at a little before 11, and we set out to try to get to Yangjuan the same day. This would have been impossible just a few months ago, before the opening of the final link in the freeway between Chengdu and Xichang completed the trans-continental superhighway from Beijing to Kunming, but now it seemed possible.

Anyone who has had the privilege of riding in Li Xingxing’s car knows that he doesn’t dally at the wheel, and so it was no surprise that, just four hours and ten minutes after we got on the freeway on the outskirts of Chengdu, we were at the Xining exit outside Xichang, for a brief pit-stop including a snack of hard-boiled eggs and salty crackers. The freeway itself is worth commentary, for which see my post about this engineering marvel. We left Xichang a little before 4:00, and were at Ma Fagen’s house, where we stay in Yangjuan, at exactly 7:00. Counting the time on the surface streets before we mounted the freeway, it was less than eight and a half hours door-to-door, compared with the previous 10 hours on the train and up to six hours in the car, or two days if one drove the whole way.

It was cloudy and drizzly the whole time we were in Yangjuan, with the exception of one lovely moonlit evening, which dissolved back to rain before dawn. This made for a lot of mud on the village roads and lanes, and very limited opportunity for the hiking I usually like to do when I’m there. But the real business of the trip was scholarships, and I’m happy to report that this important part was highly successful.

Since our funds, generous as our donors have been, were not sufficient to give quite as much aid to both high-school and college students as we would have liked, we made an on-the-spot decision to concentrate on college students, and to give 3000 yuan (a little over $500) to each of the three students who are now enrolled in four-year, bachelor’s degree programs, and 2200 yuan (a little less than $400) to each of the who are either in three-year, vocational and technical programs, or in the special college-preparatory classes offered to ethnic minority students after high school. This left only token awards for the 82 high-school level students, including four in 5-year, post-middle school nursing programs, 10 in three-year, high-school level nursing and vocational programs, and 68 in regular high schools. We gave 600 yuan ($95)–a little extra congratulation and incentive–for students starting high-school this year, and 400 ($65) for those continuing in high school level programs. Finally, we were encouraged by local leaders, including Yangjuan Primary School Founder Prof. Ma Lunzy, Baiwu Administrative Village Head Ma Guohua, and the Yangjuan teachers, to give small congratulatory prizes of 200 yuan each to the 38 students who graduated from Yangjuan this year and are starting middle-school this week.

We want to give special thanks to Yangjuan Primary School founder Benoit Vermander and his co-worker at the Taipei Ricci Institute, Jacques Duraud, for their generous help in finding funds to meet the ever increasing needs of our scholarship program; this year they raised over a third of the money that we were able to distribute to our scholarship students. We also want to thank those who have committed to sponsoring particular students with full college scholarships: Beverly Bossler and James Tsui; Rachel Meyer, in memory of Liu Vuli (Lili); Alicia Robbins and Nina Robbins; Margaret B. Swain and Walter Swain; and Cheung Siu-woo.

Every year, it takes a lot of effort on the part of local people, including Principal Sha Kaiyuan and the teachers of the Yangjuan School, village officials and parents, CMEF board members–particularly Prof. Li Xingxing and me–and the indefatigable Ma Fagen, to determine exactly who is eligible for scholarships. We always require new recipients to show their acceptance notices from their college or high school in order to receive our funds, and we go over the list of continuing recipients with local people to try to eliminate the rare case of someone not attending the school he or she originally intended to attend. Then, of course, we need a careful record of the proceedings.

This is more difficult than you might think. There is no functioning computer or printer at Yangjuan school, so we need to go to the nearby town of Baiwu to print the list so we will have a hard-copy record and a place for students or their parents to sign for the receipt of their scholarship money. This year, we were scheduled to present the scholarships at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, and didn’t finish the list until about 11:00 in the morning. Ma Yifei, one of our second-year vocational college students, was around and had his family’s motorcycle available, so we asked him to go to Baiwu with a USB-drive to print the list and make a couple of photocopies.

30 minutes or so later, he returned with the news that the print shop couldn’t open the .docx file, and asked me to convert it to .doc. I did that, and off he bounced on the muddy road again. Another half-hour plus, and he was back with the news that they still couldn’t open it, and the best thing would be for me to give him my laptop to take and connect to the printer there. That I was unwilling to do, but I did pop the laptop into my backpack and hop on the back of his motorcycle to see what I could to in person. The ride was bumpy, but he went slowly enough that we didn’t crash, though I did have to get off a time or two in particularly muddy stretches. When we got to the print shop, we tried several things, but it turned out that my laptop lacked the software for their Lenovo printer, so still no luck. Fortunately, another shop up the street had a more modern setup, and we printed and copied the list with no problem, and got back to Baiwu in time for Ma Lunzy’s arrival, a quick bowl of noodles, and the scholarship ceremony.

This story is best told in pictures, all courtesy of Li Xingxing.

First, there is always speechifying before we hand out scholarships:

One mother was very happy to get her child’s award:

Teacher Ma Jinyin signs for an illiterate mother while her son and teacher Ma Zipo look on:

The final event was a celebratory feast, for which families each contributed a little money. This reduced their scholarships by about 10%, but it’s something we have discussed with them many times before. In Nuosu culture, the obligation to reciprocate for a favor or present is not only socially enforced, but felt very heavily emotionally. My friend Ma Jyjy explained it to me: if you give us something major, like a scholarship, and we don’t reciprocate for the gift, “hxiemat jie ap jjip,” “our hearts will not settle,” in other words we feel anxious, unfulfilled, apprehensive. So there was an ox, a sheep, and four chickens that night for all to enjoy. The ox ran away, but they caught it a little short of the village of Gangou, and it was duly brought back, slaughtered, butchered, and served. A good time was had by all. We’re still hoping that next time we can persuade them to forget the ox and just have a nice meal of mutton and chicken.  We think it will be plenty to show their gratitude.

~~~~~

Stevan Harrell joined the faculty of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies (later to become the Jackson School) in 1974, and has been a member of the China studies faculty ever since.  He is now Professor of Anthropology, Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, Adjunct Professor of Chinese, and Adjunct Curator at the Burke Museum. He has written extensively on family, demography, religion, ethnicity, education, and environment in Taiwan and Sichuan.

Steve and his students helped build Yangjuan Primary School in 1999-2000, and founded Cool Mountain Education Fund in 2005, to help graduates of Yangjuan go on to middle school, high school, and college.   If you would like to read more about the Cool Mountain Education Fund or find a way to become involved in its work, please take a look at its website, which can be found here.