Wokai Adventures

A Birthday Surprise and a Red Packet with Real Impact

Sam Lee

A Hong Kong native, Sam Lee is a member of Wokai's Seattle Chapter.  When he's not spreading the word about Wokai, he works for Amazon.com. 

Recently I received a gift from my good friend Vic in the form of an email: “Vic made a donation to Wokai in your name...”  Connecting the dots, I realized it was a birthday gift! Some old memories started coming back: last year we made a pact to stop sending gifts by mail, since it's not very environmentally-friendly. So here it was, a virtual gift with real-world impact!

When we talked, I asked her if she had any feedback about the website in general. She asked, “can I donate, say, $8 as a form of red packet for my friends overseas?” (In Chinese, the number eight is associated with luck.) 

I was dumbfounded. What a GREAT idea!

Well, it was a bit too late to do it “right” on Wokai directly. However, if you're like me, and procrastinate but are willing to use whatever workaround, here is what I just did to send my friend B a belated Chinese New Year greeting, across the Pacific Ocean.

1. I contributed $8 to Liming’s loan to help her raise cattle.

2. As a lucky money alternative, I attached my donation receipt email to the Chinese New Year greeting I sent my friend B.

3. I finished the greeting with a bit of personal news! Holidays are a great time to catch up with friends. 

Wishing you all a belated happy Chinese new year!  祝您身体健康! (That says, "I wish you good health")

Cow Dung, Poverty and Microfinance in Inner Mongolia

Leslie Forman

What does it mean to be green?  How do energy sources relate to poverty alleviation in developing countries?  Who should be making decisions about rural energy use? 

I've been thinking more about these questions lately.  We recently posted some new borrowers on Wokai, whose businesses focus on selling cow dung to burn as fuel.  Here's one such profile:

Several things stand out to me in Aodunsiqige's profile: her daughter's poetic name and musical ambitions, her family's transition from selling millet to lending equipment to selling cow dung, her awareness of options and prices for winter heating materials... 

Curious about the environmental impact of Aodunsiqige's business, I asked my friend Jimmy Tran, who is a pHd student in Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, writing his dissertation on air quality in China.  Jimmy shared the following chart:

Source: World Health Organization.  Download WHO_FuelForLife_2006

In other words, the energy content of dung is low, so you need to burn a lot to produce heat.  Combustion is inefficient, and releases many toxic products, which are harmful to both climate and health.  Much of the burning happens indoors, which exposes people directly to the smoke. 

The use of dung for heating is most common in high elevation regions, where wood and agricultural products are scarce, meaning few alternatives exist.  However, the dung is produced locally, which suggests that less energy is expended in transporting it to its destination. 

Thanks Jimmy for sharing your expertise! 

George, who recently returned from Inner Mongolia, says that dung is used for both cooking and heating homes.  He visited a family that had an empty brick compartment in their house, that heated the room and the food cooking on the stove, and had the resulting smoke channel away through the chimney.  They can also burn coal in the same compartment.  Here's a quick video he made showing what this looks like: 

This reminds me of a blog post that Courtney wrote last year, about her conversation with Tracey Turner from MicroPlace regarding including a "green filter" on Wokai.org to differentiate borrowers using environmentally-friendly technologies.  She wrote:

Are green borrowers necessarily "better" or more "worthy" of a microfinance loan than non-green borrowers? Is it right to create a "green" tier system? Shouldn't the loan distribution be based more on need rather than a "green" factor? Why should Wokai empower users to impose their standards on the working poor? Shouldn't it be based more on a redistribution of wealth than a redistribution of standards?

Yes and no. Some green technologies are beneficial in the eyes of both the user and borrower. For example, some of the microentrepreneurs we visited in Ningxia Province were using solar panels to decrease costs. Why pay for electricity when they can rely on solar energy for free? (Solar panels were donated to the village by a Chinese solar company.) Another borrower we spoke with used biogas to heat her stove. Her entire house was completely sustainable. In both these situations, using clean technologies and microfinance ultimately allowed borrowers to drive down costs. Such a situation allows both borrowers and users to gain from the combination of green and microfinance. ...

Microfinance is about helping those in need and green efforts should be secondary to that. It is our intention to allow users to search by those most in need as well as those that use green business practices. In order to make it all work together, I think it is important to educate users about the green factor, why some borrowers can be green and other can't. It will also be important to monitor non-green borrowers to make sure they are not being left behind because of the "green" filter. We intend to do so. 

Overall, I think that Aodunsiqige's business is a pragmatic way to apply the resources available in her community to meet a critical seasonal need.  I am proud to support borrowers like her in their entrepreneurial endeavors.  At the same time, there is much room for energy innovation in China.  What if there were a more environmentally friendly solution that was both cheaper than local alternatives and presented easily-noticed benefits like improved smell and heat capacity?  I've read about D.light Design, which makes solar-powered lights for India, and Suntech Power, China's largest solar company, and I attended the latest event hosted by BEER (Beijing Energy and Environment Roundtable) and I am enthusiastic about the great work that people are doing to address these issues! 

Happy Year of the Ox! Downturn's Impact on Yilong County, Sichuan

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Marketing Director.  She's in Beijing, listening to fireworks that have been blasting for more than 24 hours. 

My dad just sent me this Associated Press article that describes the mood this Spring Festival in Yilong County, Sichuan.  This area is of special interest to us, since we will soon start uploading profiles from our second Field Partner, the Association for the Rural Development of Yilong County. 

The article begins...

Migrants find harsh homecomings in China

By ANITA CHANG Associated Press

Jan. 19, 2009, 8:05PM

BEIYA VILLAGE, CHINA — For Chen Xiaohong, the global economic crisis started with unsold portable DVD players.

“The factory just couldn’t move the merchandise. It sat there for three months. They said it was because of the financial crisis,” said Chen, a slight 37-year-old in a navy suit with the trouser legs rolled up to keep the hems out of the mud.

Chen, his wife and a half-dozen relatives worked at the factory on China’s southern coast. Now they’re all back in their rural village home earlier than expected for the country’s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year, with plenty of time on their hands.

Click here to read the rest

Particularly interesting to me was this passage, which specifically references Yilong County's demographics:

In Yilong County, where Beiya is located, more than a quarter of its 1.1 million residents migrate off the farm to find work, according to the local labor bureau.

I think that microfinance provides people with the opportunity to make a living while staying in their rural hometowns.  I can't wait to read the stories from our borrowers there.  Zhangsheng, Wokai's Director of Partnerships, has told me some incredible stories about his visits with families that live on the tops of mountains, and borrowers that raise rabbits (like Zhuang LiPing pictured below.) 



Also, I've found a handful of other New Year's related links that I'd like to pass along:

The Wall Street Journal shares an opinion piece by Lynette Ong from the Far East Economic Review:

If you are wondering where to park your investments as global financial markets tumble, rural credit in China may offer a silver lining. But, it's important to make the right pick from a basket of good and bad eggs.

The rural financial market in China serves the financial needs of 750 million farmers and a growing number of vibrant small -- and medium -- sized enterprises in a vast area covering 2,800 counties, 40,000 townships, and at least 400,000 villages. While it is traditionally not on the radar of profit-seeking investors, the recent market liberalization introduced by the central government is changing that. Competition is being introduced to the 35,000 rural credit cooperatives (RCCs) that monopolize the sector around the country, even though most of them operate inefficiently and carry huge nonperforming assets.

*rest of this article requires login, but if you're interested, email me (leslie dot forman at wokai dot org) and I'll send it to you...*

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: "In China, out-of-work migrants destablizing"

And Leigh Billings writes on China Crossroads, "2009 is the year of the ox…the hard-working animal that can only ring in an arduous year."



Here's to celebrating the value of hard work in 2009!  Happy New Year, everyone!

Chifeng Revelations: What I Learned in Inner Mongolia

George Scott

George spent about a month in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, as the first Wokai Fellow.  He is now back with Wokai in Beijing.

The prospect of living alone in Daban, Chifeng for over a month didn’t immediately strike me as daunting, but what kept me up at night as my departure became imminent was how to make the experience successful.  Having never done something like this before, I didn’t understand what this would mean.  I was theoretically prepared but had actually only booked a hotel and bought a very expensive but very warm jacket.

This is the view northeast over Daban, from Nanshan (South Mountain.)

During my first few days in Chifeng, I had to explain myself and the purpose of the program on many more than one occasion to both Huo Zhuren, the head of CZWSDA, and Cao Zhuren, the Youqi branch director.  (Chifeng is the region's central city, Youqi is a rural district within Chifeng, and Daban is a town in Youqi.)  Although I knew I was unprepared, this was a very unsettling start.  I knew that the fellowship’s success depended on a “mutually symbiotic” relationship between myself and the MFI.  By this I mean a relationship from which Wokai and I would derive as much from CZWSDA as I would be able to give in return.

Without this equal standing it’s very easy for the fellow to be seen as a burden, and that’s certainly how I felt when I arrived.

One of the main problems facing the permanent establishment of a fellowship at the Youqi branch of CZWSDA is that they have absolutely no need for a foreign worker.  The branch is very rural and the work they do is only concerned with the issue and collection of loans and their repayments.  They have an adequate supply of loan officers that means that there is no need for any further assistance, least not from a foreigner who speaks middling Chinese!

The Youqi / Daban microfinance team.  From right to left, the Youqi branch accountant Liu Qingxia, the Chifeng branch accountant Han Xueqiu, and Youqi branch director Cao Budao. Here they are in a taxi going to a center meeting.

There was no need for me to help them in the office, and no way in which I could repay them for all the help they were giving me.  Since the work I could do was trail them to borrower meetings, usually one or two three days a week, this had the added effect of making my days far less full then I had hoped.  With a lot of time on my hands, I found myself questioning the value of my presence there.

In the only ethnically Han Chinese village I visited, the borrowers asked me why I was there.  Without waiting for an answer, the women lurched on to say I was there to see how poor they were and to take pictures to show the world.  Without being able to be productive, the fellow becomes little more then a reporter, prying into the lives of the borrowers to ask how poor they were, take pictures to show that they have nothing, and return home patting myself on the back under the illusion that by being there I had made some sort of difference.

The other barrier I faced as a fellow was the level of contact I was able to have with the borrowers themselves.  Prior to my arrival I had rather naively thought that I would be granted license to limitless contact and would be able to meet with the borrowers freely, when I wanted.  Apart from the logistical problems with this, another issue is the impact that kind of visit might have.

During the short time I spent in Daban I found the villages to have been incredibly warm and generous.  At each household we were served milk tea and some food, all completely unnecessary as far as I was concerned, but for my hosts essential for even the most basic level of hospitality.  Even with the loan officer I had to almost force my way into the taxi amid protestations that we stay and eat with them.

Cuye, recording a repayment.

After one visit to a local village I asked Cuye, the loan officer I was with, if it would be possible for me to spend a day in a village with one of the families (who had invited me to visit).  That way, I told her, I would be more able to fully understand the way they lived.  The answer she gave me was categorically no.  She noted that even on the few occasions that I had gone with her to borrower meetings, our hosts had done more, and provided more food and drink then they would have had she gone on her own.  If I were to visit alone they would feel obliged, no matter what I said, to give me a banquet and treat me as a special guest, which would be unfair and unreasonable to ask of them.

On my first day in Chifeng, Cao Zhuren, the local director, also made it fairly clear and understandable, that the only contact I could have with the borrowers would be when I was accompanied by a loan officer. The loan officers are very protective of their customers, with whom they often have strong friendships (having grown up in neighboring communities or worked together for a number of years). They don’t want to see them exploited, and at that time Wokai had only began to help a small handful of their well over a thousand customers.

Michoko and her husband Baiyin outside their sheep pen. I had just asked them which was their favourite sheep, so they decided to catch it for me.

Michoko decided she would have to show me exactly which one.  So we spent 15min trying to catch it. This was her, didn't catch the name though.

They perhaps didn’t completely understand the full reason for a fellow being there. This limited what I was able to achieve, since loan officers make only three days of visits a week, and visit each village only once every two weeks.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think it’s worth having a fellow in Daban.  I think there are many benefits that can be drawn by establishing a presence there.  I think the big issue is trust and understanding.  Many of the problems I faced might have been easier to overcome if the loan officers weren’t so suspicious, and more fully understood the reason for my presence there.

In fact it’s been asked of Wokai that everything I write here be first translated into Chinese and shown to the head office in Chifeng before publishing on this blog.  Toward the end of my visit, however, the loan officers had begun to relax and grow more comfortable with me.  Hopefully over time, as Wokai helps more of their customers take microloans, they will realize that as an organization we are sensitive to the impact that we have and are working toward the same goal.

As for my fellowship, I think it was a success but there is still a lot of work we have to do.

Me and the gang; our visiting Cameraman Chris (middle) and infamous That’s Beijing reporter Alistair (left). The last few days I spent in Inner Mongolia, the three of us visited borrowers and explored Daban together.

From the Cultural Revolution to Wokai: My Microfinance Journey

Hongqing Chen

Hongqing gave this speech at the Wokai Launch Celebration in Seattle (to a standing ovation!) 

My mother was a microlender to fellow villagers during the Cultural Revolution.  For about three years, my family lived in one of the poorest villages in Jiangxi Province.  In the commune system, villagers were required to give one pig per family per year to the commune in addition to working the field.  They were not paid for their work.  Instead, they got working credits.  At the end of the harvest, each family was allocated grains pro rated by its members’ combined working credits, from the leftover after the county government received its quota.  They were paid at minimum price for the pig quota.  After paying for daily needs of anything that they could not produce, such as kerosene, salt, soy sauce, needles, threads, fabric, etc., there was little left.  Since my parents retained their little salaries even after they were laid off from their working units and sent to countryside, villagers borrowed cash from my mother for emergency or purchasing piglets.  They paid her back with goods or cash raised by selling eggs or vegetables, or after selling extra pigs.  She did not charge interest and always got her money back except for one borrower, the head of the village.

 

The slogan on this Cultural Revolution poster translates to "Reach for Your Potential in the Great Country!" (Source: BenRoss.net)

Now for myself.  My career of over nine years at Washington Mutual as a risk and portfolio manager has ended.  I need to find employment.  As I reassessed my career path, I have realized that I also need to increase the portion of my life toward the improvement of my fellow men on this planet.  Microfinance seems to be a good fit for me, as it combines my education, experience and personal goal.  Through the search for microfinance organizations, I found Washington CASH and signed up as a volunteer there.  I also found Wokai and jumped on the offer to blog on its website.  At Wokai, being a Chinese is a plus.  I admire Wokai staff’s passion and dedication to elevate China’s poor.  How could I stand on the sideline, as an ethnic Chinese, when so many people unrelated to China care so much about my kinsmen?

During a conversation, Casey relayed an argument from a Seattleite that struck me.  This gentleman asked: “Why should we help China?  Why not let the Chinese government solve its own problem?”  To respond, I’d like to borrow a statement from Dr. Martin Luther King, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and modify it to “Poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere.”  Poor people sometimes are driven to do radical or criminal things to support their families.  There are plenty examples.

Charity is one way to solve the problem of poverty.  Microfinance goes one step further.  We all know the saying: “Give a man a fish and it feeds him once.  Give him a fishing pole and he can feed himself everyday.”  Many friends, colleagues and I donate funds and volunteer time to worthy causes every year. 

I believe that micro lending is a great way to give because FIRST, it is so effective.  MFIs everywhere report low loss rates, contradicting common rating agency rule that low credit scores means higher loan losses.  Consequently, your micro loan money lent to someone can be used again and again.  SECOND, in the case of Wokai, because Wokai passes 100% of loan amount to micro loan borrowers in China, your contribution is not diluted by administration fees or other incidental charges.  THIRD, and probably most importantly, this form of donation gives people the dignity of working to take care of themselves when normally financial services are denied to them.

Jim Thomas, CEO of Community Capital Development told me that it takes about $35,000 to create a job (that takes people off welfare) here.  Percy Barnevik, CEO of Hand in Hand International estimated that it takes about $200 to create a job in developing world. Imagine how many jobs will be created with your micro lending contributions!  I invite you to join me and realize the difference we can make together!

* Without Margie Hussey, a published writer and a great friend and neighbor, this speech would have been dull and boring.  I also want to thank my colleagues and friends Bob Shaw, Ketty Loeb, Megan Davidson, Seva Kumar, Andy Subkoviak, and John Shepherd for their suggestions, editing, and proofreading.

Media Madness: Wokai is in the Seattle Times, Danwei, and Lost Laowai!

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Marketing Director. 

This has been a terrific day!  Casey spoke at two events in Seattle: a legal roundtable and Microbrews and Microfinance. And today we're in...

Kristi Heim, whose column focuses on the Business of Giving, wrote an excellent profile of Casey and Wokai.  It's called Microfinance: a mecca for 21st century idealism and it begins...

What can get a crowd of young, hip Seattleites more excited than an REI clearance sale or an afternoon of sun in January? You guessed it. Lending money to poor people. It helps, of course, that beer is involved.

The star of the bimonthly Microfinance and Microbrews event tonight is Casey Wilson, 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of Wokai, a non-profit that aims to expand small loans for the rural poor in China. In Chinese, wo kai means "I start."

I took some time out this afternoon to talk with her about the organization, which now has three chapters in the U.S., an office in Beijing and an army of highly motivated volunteers.

I asked her why start in China, a country wealthy enough to finance the U.S. national debt.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

If you're in Seattle, be sure to attend our launch celebration this Saturday at Spitfire.  It's sure to be a good time! 

And today...

posted the video of Casey's Tech Talk at Google in the top right corner of its homepage! 

And, Ryan McLaughlin from ...

wrote a generous profile about Wokai.  (For those of you that have never lived in China, "laowai" is a common and slightly pejorative respectful word for foreigner.) 

Ryan's article begins...

Wokai, or “I start”, is a new(ish) Web site offering microfinancing to China’s poor.

There are few things that make me tingle like the principle of microfinancing does. I’d like to think I have a philanthropist’s heart (if not the wallet), and as much as I believe “give it and forget it” charities unarguably do amazing things for this world, microfinancing is just way cooler than traditional charity models.

It brings “charity” down to a more even level, where “givers” become lenders and “the poor” become borrowers. Not only is it financially empowering, but it is emotionally empowering as well. That Courtney McColgan and Casey Wilson (Wokai’s co-founders) have taken this and applied it to China’s impoverished deserves not applause, but ovations.

Click here to read more. 

Thank you so much to Kristi, Eric Mu and Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei, and Ryan!  We can't tell you how much we appreciate your support. 

Casey's Tech Talk at Google -- Changing China One Loan at a Time

Bureaucracy and Creativity: Cornerstones of Life in China

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Marketing Director.

Bureaucracy and creativity.  Yesterday, I split my energy evenly between these disparate concepts, which I believe to be two cornerstones of life in China. 

Bureaucracy.  Naomi and I have been hard at work registering my visa, which gives me legal permission to work here.  Since I arrived here six weeks ago, I have:

- Traveled to a hospital in a faraway "Silicon Valley" district of Beijing for an official medical exam involving an ultrasound, x-ray, blood test, and more
- Biked through the hutongs (on New Year's Eve, in freezing-cold wind without a hat or gloves) to four different police stations to register my residence

(Here's a photo I took of the 4th police station that day.  It's amazing how photos add rosy-colored glasses these experiences.) 

Yesterday, Naomi and I spent most of the day resolving the fact that I'd unintentionally overstayed my entry visa for eight days.  Naomi is Wokai's Chief Operating Officer, and she speaks excellent Chinese and has vast experience here.  I was supposed to complete my registration within 30 days after my arrival, but I'd thought I needed to start the process within 30 days (as was the case with my previous Chinese visas). 

Here's a mental picture: Naomi speaking sweetly but forcefully into her cell phone, asking the police from station #2 of the day to deliver my passport to station #3 of the day, so that we can register and resolve my accidental eight-day overstay.  Between these phone calls, as we sit waiting on the hard metal chairs in the stuffy waiting room, I update her on the far-fetched drama from the last Nip/Tuck episode.  This helps to temper our impatience. 

I also mentally justify the many bureaucratic steps by invoking what I know to be the Chinese government's greatest fear: unemployment.  In other words, it's good to employ as many people as possible in the many local government branches. 

After this day of waiting, I attended a really interesting event celebrating the flip side of life in China.

Creativity.  Jeremy Goldkorn, of Danwei.org, hosted his 3rd Plenary Session at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (which he hilariously advertised throughout the presentation) about Creative Business in China.  He featured three successful entrepreneurs:

Dominic Johnson-Hill, founder of Plastered T-shirts and winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year section of the British Business Awards;

Richard Robinson, serial tech entrepreneur, founder of mobile gaming company Kooky Panda and of Chopschticks, which organizes stand up comedy shows across Asia;

Kaiser Kuo, rock star, tech startup veteran and Group Director for Digital Strategy of Ogilvy China

Here are some of my take-aways:

- Dominic emphasized that creativity is well-respected in China.  He said that much of his success can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time with the right people. 

- Richard said that companies should embrace the super distribution that comes with piracy.  He also said that he feels so free when he walks away from bureaucratic institutions like embassies, because in the wide world of China anything is possible.  Things can come together very fast once you get the right people on board. 

- Kaiser came to China seeing himself as a "metal missionary." He credits his success to creating a strong demarcation between his avocation (music) and vocation (journalism and PR).  He gave some interesting advice for aspiring journalists: write about topics that other journalists don't like writing about.  In his case, this meant high-tech news, which overseas publications were willing to pay for. 

- Jeremy's favorite Chinese word is 江湖 (jianghu) which literally means rivers and lakes, but refers to gangsters and the informal rules to learn to get things done in China.  He credits his success in the media business to staying small, writing mostly in English, and using the Chinese media as his main source. 

I've been to lots of events about doing business in China, and this was one of the best I've seen.  Maybe part of that was the fact that Jeremy kept pouring wine for the panelists to loosen their lips.  If you're interested in watching the whole presentation, here's the link to the streaming video. 

 Bringing together these two experiences, my overall feeling about China is one of optimism and opportunity.  For Wokai, there is so much that we can do, to connect China's social sector with contributors worldwide.  With a generous dose of patience and the right people on board, these bureaucratic obstacles can definitely be overcome. 

(That's the tree in the courtyard of our hutong office, covered in construction rubble but still reaching towards the sky.) 

A Reaction to James Fallows' Interview

Hongqing Chen

Note from Leslie Forman: I asked Hongqing to react to my previous post, about James Fallows' interview with Terry Gross.  Given her vast experience in finance, roots in Jiangxi Province, and excellent posts for this blog, I knew that she would be able to analyze this more closely than I could.  Here's a part of an email that she sent to me, which I have shared with her permission.  We look forward to hearing your comments.

Chinese government leaders, current and past, are all masters of the political power strategies documented and illustrated by Sun Tzu, The Book of History (史书), and many classic novels such as The Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, Legends of Water Marshals, etc.  It is easy to understand why China has invested so much in the US once you look at this from military strategy or power accumulation perspective.

In short, business people are short-sighted as they are trained to focus on the bottom line and short-term profit.  Intellectuals (including perhaps James Fallows) tend to be idealists, who want to find the good in anything.  Almost everybody can be used as tools, as they are easily fooled and persuaded.  Those who know how to play the game of power, however, are the masters of chess board who use every piece to advance their overall objectives.

So, why do I still want to work for the masses who are at the Bottom of the Pyramid?  It's because I am also an idealist and a believer in equal rights for all.  Amid all these games, those who have suffered the most deserve to be helped in any way possible.

James Fallows on the US-China Relationship

Leslie Forman

Leslie is Wokai's Marketing Director.

James Fallows explains the financial ties between the US and China, in a way that's interesting and easy to understand, in this interview with Terry Gross from NPR. 

Some of the most interesting things I learned from this interview:

-The US depends on China a lot in the long run, but China can't help with the Detroit bailout or other urgent matters.

-China's very high savings rate, both among individual citizens and as a government, gives it special power in international economics.

-George W. Bush has been relatively good for China, because he's caused no real ripples in US-China relations. If the Chinese could have voted in this election, they likely would have re-elected him. 

I've written here about his work before, and I was especially excited to listen to this interview because I'd read about the process of recording it from 2:30-3:30 am Beijing time here on his blog.  

I'd like to be able to connect this more closely with Wokai, but I personally don't know enough about finance to do so. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email at leslie.forman (@) wokai.org.  Thanks!

P.S. I also invite you to read this fascinating interview with James Fallows on The China Beat. His book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, came out this week.