The Harvard China Forum is one of the biggest conferences held at Harvard Business School where influential leaders and change-makers in business, academia and politics from China and all over the world come to have meaningful discourse about China’s internal issues and foreign relations with the United States, and generate solutions. If you’re interested in China relations/studies like me, you’d want to be here at #HCF2017. I felt like a hard-core kpop fan attending K-Con in Los Angeles. And I did it for free!
Here’s how: I applied to be a volunteer and their volunteers get to attend for free. Around April 2017, they launched their volunteer application and I was lucky to be accepted. I was super excited and *gosh* it was DOPE!
Here’s the agenda - check out their speakers :)
Being a volunteer means you get to see the plannings that happen behind the scenes, get seats in super-crowded panels and make new friends. Just what I wanted. Of course, it’s also a lot of work; be prepared to be on your feet all day. (I even fell asleep during the day once >.<)
Some cool highlights…
Meeting Awesome People
There were so many well-known intellectuals, business leaders and politicians everywhere that I lost count — I even saw Yiting Liu aka the Harvard Girl! It was amazing to be surrounded by people who are inspiring AF. The organizers and volunteers at HCF were really nice and it was much more fun because of them. I learned a lot from them; we had some really good discussions about life/grad school; and now I have more friends who study at different universities in the Boston area.
Listening to Awesome Discussions
There were panels that explored really cool topics like US-China Relations in a Time of Uncertainty, Opportunities in Sustainable Development, One Belt, One Road Initiative (OBOR), and Beijing’s Influence by top business leaders, politicians and academics. I got to listen to a talk by Lucy Peng Lei, Co-founder of Alibaba and Chairwoman of Ant Financial where she talked about encouraging sustainble life-styles by gamifying it and displayed a prototype. Lei Jun, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi shared his vision of providing quality technology for a very low price, in other words, democratizing life-changing technologies.
There were questions of how investments by “normal civilians” are increasing. Is this good or bad? Including a discussion about the trend of “Made in China” for the Chinese. I learned that some speakers percieve that the Chinese economy is slowing down because the population is aging, there are low wages and real estate prices are soaring.
I want to share some excerpts from my notes (I forgot which panels I heard them from):
The current administration’s stance on US-China Relations is precarious and unpredictable. Therefore, there has to be caution and yet China cannot afford to close up as it will hurt the economy. The only way is partnership for mutual benefits.
The centralized Chinese govt has the power to make big decisions but this mean they can also make bad ones
There are embedded systems in the world. Globalization, neoliberalism and captialism are some of them. These sytems cannot be changed or ignored. Therefore, we have to embrace them (like exponential wealth growth) but with precautions to mitigate the negative effects of such systems (like better distribution of wealth).
“If you don’t trade, you won’t die but you also won’t flourish”
Pretty cool, eh?
Witnessing Crazy Innovations
Finally, there was a mixer at the end where established startups wooed more investors and showcased their progress. Almost of all them had co-founders who are pursuing their phDs at MIT and Harvard. The one that caught my attention was Xtalpi, a startup founded in 2014 by a group of quantum physicists at MIT. It’s a cloud-based technology company that provides computational crystal structure prediction for small-molecule drugs and won the Harvard China 2016 Pitch competition. Basically, they use better algorithms to reduce the time and cost to test and make drugs!
#HCF2017 was super cool and I am more drawn into the complex landscape of China. I am grateful for the President of HCF2017 for choosing me to be a volunteer. If you’re looking to volunteer, the utmost essentials are coffee, comfortable shoes, genuine enthusiasm, and of course the weChat app. My only regret is that I don’t speak fluent Mandarin.
Thank you for reading.
My name is Juliet. My interests are definitely not one-dimensional (hence my handle name: Juliet>1). Feel free to leave a comment and connect with me :)
(ႀကိဳက္ရင္ 💚 ေလးကိုႏွိပ္လိုက္ပါ။ ဒီလိုဆိုရင္ သင့္ရဲ႕သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြလည္း ဂ်ဴးလိယက္ေရးထားတာ ကိုျမင္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ 🙂)
