Yifu Dong is a columnist for Caixin. He is a graduate of Beijing No. 4 High School and Yale College. He has worked as a Research Associate for the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. His English writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and China Channel. His Chinese writing has appeared in The New York Times Chinese Website, FT Chinese, and Caixin.
Jieqian Zhang is a graphics editor at The Wall Street Journal. She recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. During her time in Berkeley, she was able to ignite her passion for data and graphic reporting, as well as international reporting. She was the 2016 Google News Lab Fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Before that, she worked at Google Trends as a contributing graphic designer and was a visuals intern at ChinaFile.
Helen Hai is the CEO of the Made in Africa Initiative and adviser to the governments of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Senegal for investment promotion and industrialization. She is a senior adviser on South-South cooperation for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and works closely with the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, the Tony Blair African Governance Initiative, and other multilateral players involved in development issues in Africa. She is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
Hai is an experienced business executive and an expert in the field of development. For over two years, she worked in Ethiopia where she served as the Vice President and General Manager for overseas investment for the Huajian Company, one of China’s biggest shoemakers. The shoe factory she established in the capital, Addis Ababa, started production in January 2012 and, within two years, employed 3,500 workers. She has recently launched the Made in Africa Initiative with the aim of assisting African countries to capture the opportunity of inclusive and sustainable industrial development.
Hai was trained as an actuary in the United Kingdom and previously served as Vice President and Chief Actuary for Zurich Financial Services in China. She has an EMBA from INSEAD and Tsinghua University.
It’s graduation time, and Chinese graduates from American colleges are now pondering what to do next: return to China or stay in the U.S. We reached out to recent graduates to ask about their decision-making process and how they view their prospects at home and abroad.
Yuanbo Liu is a junior majoring in Economics at Middlebury College. Liu spent most of his life in Beijing before he went to study in the U.S. After two years at The Hotchkiss School, he went on to pursue his interests in economics and political science at Middlebury. Coming from China, Liu developed a strong interest in U.S.-China relations. He was a summer intern with Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in 2012. He also has explored his interests at other internship positions with CICC U.S. and the Murtala Huhammed Foundation.
Gelebasang received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007, was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia from 2012-2014, and recently, in 2016, graduated with a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University.
In 1993, Fritz Hoffmann was a young American photojournalist ready for a new adventure. He had honed his picture-making skills while hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest, harvesting crabs in Alaska, and working at newspapers in West Virginia and Tennessee. From a base in Nashville, he first became a breaking news photographer, covering events like the Oklahoma City bombing for Newsweek. Though business was booming, Hoffmann “loathed the media scrum” this work entailed.
J. Hoberman is the author, co-author, or editor of 12 books, most recently Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema (Verso). In addition to the NYRBlog, he writes regularly for The New York Times, Artforum, and Tablet and was for 33 years a film critic at The Village Voice. The former Gelb Professor of the Humanities at the Cooper Union in New York, he has also taught at Columbia and Harvard universities.
Ding Feng is a recent graduate from the College of Wooster, Class of 2016, with a B.A. in International Relations. He is currently an intern at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Office of the Permanent Observer to the United Nations and is expected to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) soon. He also has past experience working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Representation in China.
Ding is committed to promoting mutual understanding between China and the United States. He pays close attention to the bilateral relations between the two countries, as well as the strategic incentives behind the scenes. He conducted a year-long independent study thesis on China’s strategic shift which resulted in a 106-page paper and oral defense.
Chinese students graduating from Oberlin College in 2011, left to right, Penglu Zhao, Jiayu Lin, and Yidi Wu.
