SGS CELEBRATES INTERNSHIP PROGRAM ANNIVERSARY WITH ECONOMICS SEMINAR IN BEIJING
Stanford Global Studies commemorated the 10th anniversary of its summer internship program with a dynamic and engaging seminar on China’s economy in the newly built Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU).
The audience was comprised of current and former program interns and Beijing-based Stanford alumni from all fields. Hosted by Prof. Jean Oi, the Faculty Director of both SCPKU and the Stanford China Program, the seminar on July 19 focused on “Challenges and Opportunities in China’s Changing Economy” and featured four of the most prominent names in China’s technology and media worlds.
Hurst Lin is the General Partner at DCM China, one of the country’s leading venture capital firms. He is best known for co-founding SINA, a web giant whose Weibo micro-blog service transformed the online public sphere in China.
Lin told the audience the story of SINA’s founding. Using a handful of servers in the Stanford Firehouse when Lin was an MBA student at the Graduate School of Business, SINA began as a tool for overseas Chinese college students like him to exchange information. It later successfully expanded into the Chinese markets.
Lin’s views on the future of China’s economy are colored by his entrepreneurial experience. He said China’s youngest generations have a newfound self-confidence, a feeling that “they can make a difference on their own” and help the country’s economy.
James Chen is the chairman of Hollyhigh International Capital, an investment company that specializes in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in China, including the rapidly growing market in cross-border transactions. He, too, has spent time at Stanford. Chen was a visiting scholar in 2012-2013 at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, a part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Chen said that his office at Stanford was a stone’s throw from two Secretaries of State. He joked that the concept of China-U.S. relations as akin to a married couple—a metaphor used in a speech by Vice Premier Wang Yang—was his idea, the result of a conversation with Condoleezza Rice.
Echoing Lin, Chen said that those born after 1990 are the “best generation in Chinese history” due to their strong belief that they can help solve China’s problems and help the country’s economic rise. Chen added that they are also the luckiest, having opportunities open to them that didn’t exist just a decade or two ago.
Many of those opportunities are “cross-Pacific opportunities,” he said, especially at companies that combine American technology expertise with Chinese capital and market access.
Kaiser Kuo is the international spokesperson for Baidu, China’s leading search engine and one of its biggest Internet companies, but he said he doubts the technology industry alone can solve the country’s most pressing challenges.
“Building an app isn’t addressing the fundamental problems in the Chinese economy, or getting to the heart of what the Internet can do for China,” he said.
Kuo also had a unique take on the frequent claims, made most prominently in speeches by Vice President Biden, that Chinese entrepreneurs are less innovative than their American counterparts.
He said that expecting investors to take high-risk gambles on innovative ideas when the country is still half rural, while expecting good returns from tried-and-true investments like a shoe factory, “defies the way capital works—but there are people doing it anyway.”
Among those bold investors is Baidu itself, which announced plans for a Silicon Valley research center. With plans to focus on neuroscience and natural language processing, Baidu hired Stanford computer-science professor and artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng as its founding director.
Hu Shuli is the founder and editor-in-chief of Caixin Media, one of the most respected sources of financial and economic news in China. She was at Stanford from 1994 to 1995 as a John S. Knight Fellow, where her mentor told her to consider staying in the U.S. because “Chinese journalism will never be a part of the international journalism mainstream.”
Hu told the audience that she knew returning to China had paid off when she met then-New York Times editor Bill Keller a few years after she founded Caijing, her first media firm. Keller surprised her by saying he thought her magazine “had the same standards as the Times,” she said.
Hu is one of the winners of the Magsaysay Award this year for the groundbreaking investigative reporting in China. The award is often described as Asia’s Nobel Prize. Hu has been hosting Stanford interns since the program’s inception.
This year, thirty-six students in the Global Studies Internship Program participated in summer internships in China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Brazil and Nicaragua. Visit the Global Studies Internship Program website for more information about the program or contact denise.chu [at] stanford.edu (Program Manager Denise Chu). Students interested in interning during summer 2015 are invited to attend the first information session in October.