What was China like more than 40 years ago?
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Is China still investable? Today, we ask the Chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, Roberto Lipson. Welcome to The Bridge, enlightening conversations on world cultures, life, and everything in between.

Hey, everyone. This is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge.

everyone. My name is Jason Smith. I'm originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Today's guest is Roberta Lipson. She is founder of United Family Healthcare, vice chair of New Frontier Health, and current chairman of AmCham China. Oh, I thought you were the vice chairman, so this makes a huge difference. I've been from

Wow. And very impressive. Welcome to the Bridge to China, Roberta. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be here, Jason. Thanks so much. I'm delighted to have you on the show. We met in Fujian briefly, and I knew instantly that I wanted to have you on the show. So I'm really glad that you were able to take time out of your busy schedule to be here. My great pleasure. Yes. Yeah, I love sharing my experience in China and the story behind it.

So it's really my great pleasure. Before we get to your decades of work in China, I think we'd like to get to know you better. Like, could you just tell us where in the States are you originally from? Well, I'm from New York, from the near suburbs of New York City. I went to school both in Massachusetts and

and upstate New York and Manhattan and Taiwan, China. I studied history and Chinese undergraduate and business school graduate.

And I've been living here in Beijing since 1979. 1979. That is remarkable. So, you know, I guess this is a really good question. In 1979, China wasn't on a lot of Americans' radar. I mean, most Americans, in my opinion, barely knew China existed. What made you decide at that time, you know what, I want to start a business in China? Okay, well, the story started before that.

And I started university in the early 70s in 1972, which was the first year that the U.S. and China started having some dialogue when Henry Kissinger came to China and they started talking about Shanghai communique. And.

And I was so interested in what was happening in that very exotic, unknown country that I decided to start studying Chinese history. And every day, the newspaper and my history textbooks would intersect. And there was so much new history unfolding that it became more and more exciting. And I decided I needed to study Chinese language to really understand what was going on there.

So I began my Chinese studies at one of the very few Chinese language programs in the United States at that time at Cornell University. And it was an intensive Chinese course and it was a 10-week course. Five of us started out and three of us were left at the end of 10 weeks. So very few people in America were studying Chinese at that time.

And frankly, I had no idea it was going to result in a lifelong career and passion. But I continued my studies later in Taiwan, came back in China and the U.S., continued there and intensified the conversations. And it looked like there was an opportunity that was going to happen at the intersection of U.S.-China relations.

So I tried, started to figure out how can I be part of it and decided as such to go to business school for my graduate education and then did everything I could to get myself over. But I did not know where it was going to lead. When I got here, it seemed like nothing.

The world was potential. Everything was possible. Everything needed doing. And it was so exciting to be part of thinking about how I could be part of it and how I could contribute. You know, I think today's China and obviously I wasn't in China in 1980s, but 1980s China, from what I've heard from other anywhere in the 1980s, you were.

A twinkle in your parents' eye in the 1980s. I was alive in the 1980s. I was watching, you know, cartoons on my living room floor and playing with Legos. That's good, too. Yeah.

What was it like in 1980s China before, you know, at the cusp, just after reform and opening up was starting out? Well, as I said, it felt like everything was potential. Beijing was a sea of bicycles and dust storms in the spring. And it was a magical place, but very, very different from what it is now. Restaurants closed down at seven o'clock. They were all state owned. Oh, yeah.

All of the American business people lived in between two or three hotels, mostly in the Peking Hotel, which is where I lived for my first two years, with many colleagues from other countries and some journalists.

And it was so fascinating that we would go out and do our thing during the day and then we'd all gather in the coffee shop at night and exchange what we saw and what we learned and what we thought it meant. And it was a bit like a college dorm.

but really exciting times. At the time, I was working for a trading company. I was hired to come and help them open their office in Beijing, 1979. It was one of the very first American companies

to be invited to open in Beijing. And I had a very open-minded boss who said, you know, we think that everything is needed here. So pursue your interests, see what you can make happen. And because at the time I was very interested in healthcare and I got to, um,

I got to look into what was happening in the healthcare world and I found out that the hospitals were really needing of new technology and upgrading technology because what they actually had at their disposal was mostly pre-World War II American refrigerators and a couple of microscopes and not much more Russian x-ray machine, not much more than that. And I

medical science had advanced so far beyond that. And so

I started a business of bringing medical technology and teaching Chinese doctors about new medical technology, diagnostic techniques, and how to use that equipment, and built a small business of importing medical equipment and devices, which eventually was spun off from that company and became...

Chindex, which is a company that I ran for many, many years. Eventually, we sold it to Fosun and United Family Healthcare grew out of that medical equipment distribution company. Wow. Well, now you're located in many cities in China. I guess you stay quite busy. So,

Specifically, what did your original company do? It was mostly importing technology from other countries and training local physicians how to use it? Or were you actually setting up hospitals? At what stage did you begin setting up your own healthcare facilities? So Chindax was spun off in 1982 and

our business was involved in not only medical equipment, but China needed a bit of everything at the time. So we had three divisions, one for medical equipment, one for scientific instrumentation, and one for construction and industrial equipment. So we would contract with

companies in the United States and Europe to represent them and distribute their products in China for everything that we thought China needed and was appropriate to the market and the stage of development. And

Business worked very differently in those days. All imported products would go through state-owned trading companies. So we had relationships with the China National Equipment Export Corporation, China National Chemical Export Corporation, and

And interestingly, the Chemical Corporation was in charge of importing medical equipment. And that later morphed, they split into several different groups and morphed into a company called Mexico, which was medical equipment and health products, important export corporation.

And they would start it out that most of our contact was at the Canton Fair, which happened twice a year in Guangzhou. It started out as a six week trade fair. It's now, I think, three weeks or maybe two. But at that time, it was six weeks. We would move to Guangzhou every day. We would go and meet with state trading leaders.

group from various provinces in China, and they would bring us the requisitions of their end users. And so a guy in Xinjiang that said he needed fertilizer equipment or a guy, a doctor in Shandong who needed, who was interested in ultrasound or a scientist that needed liquid chromatography equipment. We would, um,

learn about those needs. And my partner, for example, if I was in Guangzhou, my partner would be in New York and I would, um, telex every night. You don't even know what a telex machine is because it's ancient technology, but it's the way we used to communicate a big old clunky typewriter that sent signals to the other side. And, um,

She would find that equipment that the end users thought they wanted in the U.S. and send over a quotation for me to bring back to the buyer at the fair the next morning. And then if it was within the budget, we would sign a contract.

And after a while of doing that, we started having a deeper understanding of what was needed in China, where the demand was and companies in the West that we could work with. And so we then became the exclusive representative of those companies in China and worked on

marketing and distribution and sales and after-sales service with those companies to responsibly deliver those products to the Chinese customers that needed it. And eventually, we grew into a substantial marketing, sales, and distribution company.

we had customers and offices in many provinces throughout China. And after 10 years of doing that,

the customers that we sold to became much better equipped and their hardware became more and more sophisticated. And they were able to really match hospitals in the West with their hardware. But I felt there was a lot of other

around the delivery of medical care that could still use some upgrading in China. So we started thinking about, well, you know, there's an expatriate community here who has medical needs and, you know,

They're going abroad when they have medical needs. And perhaps we can start a small hospital or clinic that we could meet those needs here in China. And also at the same time, be a bit of a platform for Chinese doctors and policymakers to see another way of delivering health care.

You see, through the through the 80s and 90s, we were often taking delegations, hosting delegations in the United States who are interested in seeing what does a modern hospital look like? What does a modern factory look like? And

you know, often the presidents of various hospitals around China or the people from the Ministry of Health, they would go and look at U.S. facilities, some of the premier U.S. facilities and say, wow, this is fantastic. It doesn't smell like a hospital. Oh, but that couldn't happen in China. And that was frustrating to me. I felt like

of course it could happen in China. Let us show you that it could happen in China. And so we started to get that idea that perhaps

we could bring some of those concepts of patient care and service delivery into the healthcare space in China. And so we started talking to the officials about whether we could do that or not. In the meantime, accompanied a friend of mine who was pregnant when it was time for her to deliver her baby in a public hospital in China. And it was my opportunity to see the system through the eyes of the patient.

Prior to that, I was constantly, often in Chinese hospitals, but I was there as a salesperson. So I had a different set of eyes. Accompanying my friend, I saw what this process was like for a Chinese woman who was going to have a baby. And it didn't seem optimal to me. And then when I, shortly after that, became pregnant myself and decided that I would go back to the United States to have my baby...

the experience was so different and so wonderful. I thought, I have to bring this opportunity to Chinese women. And that gave me the extra added enthusiasm of going through with this plan of trying to open a hospital in Beijing. And so we began really lobbying the officials to consider allowing us to do this. And it was really...

paving the path because there really were not any other foreign-invested hospitals in China at the time. So it was very much both for the officials and for us, it was filling the stones while crossing the river. Of course, a very exciting time. And to make something happen that the initial response from officials were, are you really serious? Do you really want to open a for-profit hospital?

in a communist country? That doesn't make sense. What are you thinking? So to actually continue, persevere and work on it and

make it happen was an amazing process. Wow, that is quite a story. In terms of like, because I think hospitals have come quite a ways from when you helped China develop and move in this direction. So in terms of now, where do you see United Family Healthcare in the community? What niche do they support? How do they

What place do they play in China's existing health care infrastructure? So whereas Chinese public hospitals have become come a long way, very sophisticated equipment, much many more well-trained doctors, even many doctors who've come back from training in the West, they're still very much overburdened.

with a lot, the best hospitals have way too many patients. They're very, very crowded. It's very difficult to preserve patient privacy. And, um,

That's something that we are able to do as a private platform. We are a totally appointment-based system. You make your appointment online, you come in, and unless there's some unexpected emergency, very little waiting, everything, patient privacy is 100%, 1000% preserved. But at

But as important as that and the excellent service and the beautiful environment we're able to supply to our patients, we also are able to tap into talent and technology, not only from the best in China, but for the best globally. So if our patients need to be part of a

a clinical trial that exists only at Mayo Clinic in the United States, we can help them to make that happen. If they want to have a consultation from, um, for an orthopedic

For a rare disease, for example, from the hospital for special surgery or from Stanford Children's Hospital, wherever the best expertise lies, we can help connect them to it. Our own facilities also, we have over 600 full-time doctors around the country and the

several thousand consultants. So we are able to tap the resource because we are one system, whether our hospital is Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou,

Shenzhen, Tianjin, Qingdao, we're all one system. So we share medical records, we share lab systems, we share imaging systems. So a patient in any one of our facilities can take advantage of the knowledge and the talent that we have within the whole system. And that's something that's quite unique. Also, many of our patients are multidisciplinary.

So they're traveling from city to city. And it's a comfort to them to know that not only are their whole historical records available any place they go within the United Family System, but they can expect the same standard of care, the same quality of care that they did in their home hospital. I noticed that you guys have something called an internet hospital. What is it and what services does it provide? Right. So...

Internet hospitals are platforms that allow patients to make online appointments for either video or audio consultations with their doctors. And this became quite popular during COVID when people didn't really want to go to the doctor in person.

and has continued to be useful to patients, especially for patients suffering from chronic diseases that they need a lot of follow-up or frequent, um, touch points with their doctor. So they don't have to go frequently actually physically to the hospital. They can have their consultation online. So the limitations on, um,

The limitations on online consultation in China, according to the regulations, don't allow initial diagnoses online, which is just as well because it's very important for a doctor to have physical hands-on, eyes-on the patient and interaction to make initial diagnosis.

But for follow-up care, it's really extremely efficient and really wonderful for continuity of care. Also for people that are mobility limited, have a hard time to go to the hospital when they need to, it's very, very helpful for that. And interestingly, our license is a national license. So patients as far as Xinjiang or Tibet or Yunnan can also take advantage of being online with our

with our doctors. You're listening to The Bridge. I'd like to switch gears to the American Chamber of Commerce about your role and also how, in your assessment, how does the American Chamber of Commerce here in China help Sino-US relations and economic deepening?

So, yeah, so I've been a member of AmCham for many, many years, and I've been on the board of directors for many, many terms. Most recently, I was the vice chairman of AmCham and.

And as of last month, became the chairman, unfortunately, only for the rest of the year because I termed out. But so consistent with American kind of norms of governance, we're limit term limited to two two-year terms in a row. And then we must step off the board for at least a year. But I'm very proud of the work that AmCham has done over these years.

40 years of opening up and developing of the U.S.-China relationship because it's a platform for American businesses and even Chinese businesses to come together and talk about what their goals are, what they have to offer each other, and what their challenges in the market are. And then

Can we, as AmCham, try to take those challenges to both the Chinese and the U.S. government to see if we can work together to overcome them? And the U.S.-China relationship has been through

many ups and downs, some really critical hard times. And I believe that the consistency of the business community's dedication to developing in China and to the China market has been something that has kept the relationship from really going off the rails.

And I'm expecting in the near future for us to be on some more rocky roads, perhaps to have some more challenging times in the U.S.-China relationship. And many government leaders have commended the business community for being the ballast that keeps the relationship from

completely falling over. So we expect that our role will be even more important in the coming years to help our companies through these difficult times, but also to help them to create opportunities for developing despite the challenges and also

even if our governments aren't talking to each other as often as they could be, as happened during parts of the COVID periods. If that happens again, we will think it is our responsibility

Our duty to continue the dialogue, either on a subgovernmental level or to be talking to both governments about how we can promote understanding and further the relationship in terms of because an enormous amount of.

international institutions do business now in China. I mean, obviously hospitals are a good example, but me as a consumer, I go outside, I see, you know, this McDonald's and KFC and Pizza Hut. And now we have Taco Bell and Starbucks and on and on and on. And, you know, products like I shave my face with a Gillette blade that I get at my local Walmart. So, I mean, and when I walk around, I see Lay's potato chips and all kinds of Hershey's chocolate bars, which are made, I think, Pennsylvania. So we have all of these American businesses doing

doing business in China. Given your extensive history as a business person in China and your role in AmCham, what kind of advice would you give to young American or any aged American entrepreneurs who want to come into the Chinese commercial space? Well, despite the fact that we are facing maybe some challenges in the relationship,

Oftentimes, when the going gets tough, there is the biggest opportunity for business. And I think especially for entrepreneurial business, it's a time when fresh ideas and rethinking the status quo is paramount.

possible and possible to lead to exciting times. Right now, I think the Chinese government is as open as they've ever been to foreign investment, which is a very exciting opportunity. And, you know, although the economy is not growing as quickly as it had been in the past, it's still a huge market. And

And it's still if you just take the growth in China in terms of a gross number rather than percentage basis, it will rival any other market or surpass any other market in the world in terms of growth. So I think that it's not a time to be pessimistic. It's a time to be creative. And the opportunity persists.

And if you look at me as an example, I came to China at a time when most people in my circles and my parents' circles thought I was crazy. And in fact, I think most people in the Chinese government thought,

that there must be something a little strange about this decision of a young person to come and start a career in China. But I think it's precisely at times when not everybody's doing it that the opportunity can be the most. You're listening to The Bridge.

In terms of advice that you would give, because you as a leader in the American Chamber of Commerce, obviously there are things that you guys see that can be done by the Chinese government to facilitate increased ease for Americans and other other international business persons coming into China. So in your assessment to make the Chinese business landscape more inviting, what could be done? Well,

We've recently seen great improvement in the visa situation. Just coming out of COVID, it was quite difficult for Americans to get visas to come to China. And that has improved tremendously. You can get visas at the consulates in the United States very easily. You could get 72-hour visas on arrival easily.

you can get, um, depending on what country you're coming from, uh, some countries, some hundred and something countries, I think, well, I don't know how many, some large number of companies, countries can come in visa free, which is amazing. And in some cases, unilateral. So I think that was a very, very big deal. Many of the, um, district governments in Beijing and in Shanghai are offering, um,

and incentives for entrepreneurs to start businesses in their districts. And it's worth looking into the investment development, um, department in various districts and seeing where there can be wonderful arrangements made. Um,

One of the things that I think that needs to be, that could have a great positive impact is we need more American journalists here. We need more Americans who see the true picture of China, the positive, the negative, the beauty and the warts to report that back to the rest of the world in a believable way. So right now, there are very, very few American journalists here.

And the ones that are writing in China from abroad are writing through a negative lens. And I think that if we were to really invite them back to see what's really happening here now, it would not necessarily be quite as negative. It would be more realistic and people would believe the reporting.

So I wish that China could have more confidence in the real true picture and just let

reporters report it the way it really is. We are working through AmCham also and through some of the Chinese government initiatives to offer internships. Our membership, our AmCham membership companies are hoping to be able to offer internships to

to American young people, students, new graduates who want to come and dip their feet into the China water and feel what business in China is like. And I'm hoping that will be an attractive thing to many young people. You're listening to The Bridge. The Bridge.

Your company, in some form or another, went public in 1994. And this, you know, as someone who's not really in business, this amazes me. So what kind of challenges exist for a company operating in China to go public in the United States? How does that even work? Well, it was as strange a concept then as it is now, actually. So there in the in the 90s, there was a bit of an IPO boom. And

And we had made the decision to try to open a hospital. And because before that we were a trading company, we didn't have a huge amount of capital, but we did have a track record. So we could go to Wall Street and say, we built this business pretty successfully in China. And now we'd like to expand to health care services and we need financing. And we found a very warm reception.

despite the fact that Wall Street had no idea about China. There were no Chinese companies on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange at the time. And we were able to raise a small amount of money, but it was enough for us to open our first small hospital. And it gave us the credibility to be able to continue to raise money in the market. So it was a great thing to do. Now,

in a different space, there were a lot of IPOs in the last 20 years in the US. And it's become, from regulatory perspective and political perspective, more difficult for Chinese companies to do that. But as I say, it's a bit of a cyclical process. And we have good times and harder times. And we'll see where that goes. But that having been said, there are many other ways to raise money.

either domestically in China, or there are a lot of opportunities for getting startup grants here. And also there's, of course, the Hong Kong market, the Chinese markets, Singapore market, there's the Middle East, there's Europe. And it's not, you know, right now, the U.S. probably isn't the place where people are flocking for IPOs.

And in fact, given the economy, it's probably not a good time for an IPO anywhere right now.

That will change. It will come back and there'll be that opportunity for entrepreneurs in the future, I'm sure. You know, when we originally met, we met at the Fujian Youth Conference for China-U.S. Relations. There were 500 youths from the United States and China there. And on one of the panels that you joined, you discussed the Jewish community, along with there was a Taoist there, I think there was a Catholic person.

priest there. And you talked about the Jewish community and its history in China. And you are also the co-founder of Beijing's Jewish community. I'm sorry if I mispronounced this. Kahilat Beijing? Close enough. Could you relate some of, yeah, thank you. Could you relate some of the Jewish history in China for us today? Yes, sure. So there are people that say there were Jews traveling to China as early as the third and fourth century. Um,

But we certainly know that in the Tang Dynasty, there were quite a lot of Jewish people who came across the Silk Road, both the southern Russian route as well as the northern route.

And they were living in Chang'an and eventually in Kaifeng. There was quite a large community. They were quite welcome. They even were allowed to sit the imperial exams. And there were people who served the emperor at the highest level from the Jewish community. They intermarried with, mostly they were men, and they mostly intermarried with Chinese women, but continued to keep their customs through the centuries.

And there was a community in Kaifeng who even had a beautiful Chinese-style synagogue up until the late 19th century when it burned down. And by then, they were quite integrated. They had...

Yeah, so they stopped, mostly stopped practicing. Then at the end of the 19th century, there were many Russian Jews who came to Dongbei, came to the Northeast, settled in cities like Harbin and Mudanjiang.

And they at one point maybe were as many as 13,000 Jews living in Harbin. They opened hospitals, schools. They had places of worship and built quite a large community. Some of those people

by the mid middle, by the 1910s and 20s started moving south to Shanghai where they met another group of Iraqi Jews who came via Hong Kong to Shanghai. And they were many of the real estate moguls who built Shanghai and also at the same time, who helped to build Shanghai, didn't do it single-handedly. And

And at the same time, many of them were involved in the arts, in music, in health care. There was also a Jewish hospital in Shanghai. So I feel like I'm carrying on a great tradition.

had quite an impact on society in Shanghai. And then in the 40s, there was another wave of people who came escaping the Holocaust in Europe. And Shanghai opened its doors to those people and gave them refuge when they could not find refuge elsewhere in the world. So many lives were saved in Shanghai. And I think Jewish people will be forever indebted to that.

not really much of a history of Jews in Beijing before we came in the 70s. There were a few people who had come in the 40s to help and the 30s from Europe and America to help now with the revolution. So there was, in fact, in the Yan'an period, there was a Jewish doctor who was the head of the Yan'an health ministry. And then

many others who were still living in Beijing by the time I got here. And I was privileged to meet those people who helped build modern China. Now, unfortunately, most of them are gone. Some of them are nearing 100 years old back in the U.S. for the most part. So we came with with no really no infrastructure for Jewish community at that time. And unfortunately,

And as I met other American and European Jews who were interested in being able to have community to hold holidays together and together on a weekly basis, we started

developing a community here. And I have to say that I'm very proud that 35 years later, we have alumni all over the world who still feel part of our Beijing Jewish community. And in fact, two years ago in New York City, we had a reunion of 150 people that came from Europe, Israel, the United States, and China.

to celebrate together at the Chinese consulate in New York. I think I saw some pictures of that event, actually. It was an amazing event, yes. You also won the Great Wall Friendship Award. I mean, I hope I can do something cool to win that award like that.

From the Beijing government. Yes, it's on the wall right behind me. That's why. So you also win the Beijing Wall Friendship Award from the Beijing government. And you've lived in Beijing. How do you win this award? For what did they award this to you? I want to live up to something. Right. I don't know. They called one day and they said they would like to give me an award. And I think it had to do with it was post SARS and

I think we made a big contribution to the community during SARS as we did during COVID. And, you know, we've been through hard times and I believe that some people think that

United Family has made an impact on health care in China in general. And so we're very proud that besides just saving individual lives and helping people to have healthy lives directly, we have a larger impact on the medical community in general, setting new standards, sharing our experience, and

And also being a positive force for making the international residents of the major cities in China feel comfortable and at home. So perhaps those are the things that people were thinking of when they decided to give the award. Perhaps they thought of my early days when we were bringing in needed technology, when no other big companies were here.

I'm not sure exactly what went into the decision, but I'm very proud of having won it. You know, you mentioned having lived in Beijing since 1979 in some capacity. Would you say it's safe to say that Beijing is home? Absolutely. I'm very proud to call it home. I'm also proud to have two homes. So I also consider New York my home, but Beijing is my home. So how does your family in the United States feel?

feel about you spending so much of your life here in China? Well, it was tough for my parents, but I have to say at the end of the day, they were very supportive. And when my children were little, they would come and visit several times a year and we would try to go home for vacations and spend time with them. Um,

Now my children have returned the favor to me and they're going on their own adventures. And one live in Africa, two live in London. And hopefully someday they might decide to come home to Beijing because they do consider this their home as well. Oh, yeah.

You're listening to The Bridge. The Bridge.

Well, you know, you mentioned earlier, and it's no secret that our two nations, the United States and China, have had, you know, more bumpy relations in the last five or six, seven years than we have in recent history. So I was hoping you could give us some advice using your insights as an American having spent much of her life here in China. So what advice would you give Chinese people to better understand the United States?

Yeah, I think it's really important that we keep our heads open to each other as individuals and as people, rather than listen to whatever political propaganda might be coming from the media. Also,

be careful and filter the social media. Think about the other. Think about your Chinese friends or Chinese people. Please think about your American friends as individuals that are good-hearted, well-meaning human beings, just like you are. And, um,

Let's keep sending our students in both directions so we can learn more about each other. Let's not be afraid to travel and tour each other's countries so we could advance our understanding. And let's do everything we can to promote people-to-people contact so we can keep the thread that's getting more and more fragile. And I think it's incumbent on us as

and as business people to find every way to keep that thread intact of content. You know, when I first was coming to China in 2012, my grandmother said, my grandmother warned me, oh, don't you know they're communists? And tried to basically frighten me into not coming to China. And I imagine that this is the same experience it is for a lot of young Americans when they tell their parents or grandparents, you know,

You know, I want to I'm going to China for a month or I'm going to move to China for a year to teach English or whatever it is. So what kind of advice would you give to Americans who have never been to China, but are one of their family members are considering it?

Yeah, well, you know, I think one big turnoff for people is the State Department's travel warning. We have a level three travel warning. And that comes from a couple of what I believe are isolated cases of people who have been exit banned or some of the famous cases where foreigners have been detained.

when you talk to Chinese government officials about it, they will maintain that every one of those situations or most of those, there are many, but most of those situations are because that person actually did break a law or in the case, um,

I would say that I do not let that stop you. A student is not going to be exit banned. An English teacher is not going to be exit banned unless they're doing something really bad that they shouldn't be doing. I think that there are a few people who have been, who had business disputes and the local authorities went beyond their authority

beyond their responsibility. And I believe that the Chinese government is trying to, is reining that in. I don't think a student or a business person that's here just to do business is going to have that problem. So I don't know if you're a young person and want to come to China to work or as a student,

Come with your parents on a tour trip first and they'll fall in love with China, too. So, yeah. You know, you also mentioned having students go back and forth between the United States and China. And there has been a slight downtick over the last five years of Chinese students going to the United States. So to encourage Chinese students to return to U.S. universities, what advice would you give them?

American universities are the best in the world. Don't pass up the opportunity. Not only do you get a great education, but it's also lots of fun. And there's nothing like broadening your mindset and broadening your vision by going to a different place to study and studying.

As I say, U.S. universities can't be beat. Can I ask you about your travels in China? Have you been all over China? Where have some of your favorite places, other than Beijing, of course, in China been that you've traveled around to? Well, let me just confirm that Beijing is my favorite place.

But even after 45 years, I still am coming up with amazing places I haven't been to. And I think for the rest of my life, I could keep traveling China and not run out of amazing places. Number one, on natural beauty, everything.

from Xinjiang mountains to the inner Mongolia grasslands to the Gansu desert. Amazing. Yunnan for the culture and the food, especially as a vegetarian. I love Yunnan food. There's just, there's no limit. Our trip last year to Fuzhou, even Fuzhou city is so interesting. And, yeah,

Yeah, and there just is no end to the places to visit in China that I love, love, love. Guilin to Yangshuo boat ride is absolutely world-class.

I could be here all day and tell you about my amazing favorite travels in China. You know, I we were in when we were in Fujian, we met a special group of people called the Friends of Kuliyang, these group of Americans who have been in some way living in China since the late 19th century, the late 1800s, when they founded this community in the mountains of

And you mentioned also when you arrived here in China meeting people who had been contributing to the Chinese economy, who had been your predecessors as Americans living here. Do you think that there are as deep of roots

For Americans living in Beijing, as there were in the case of Kuliyong, how many of the people that you met had been here or have families in China for more than 100 years? Two. So you didn't know it was going to be on the essay. David Cook, who...

who is a David Croke, I'm sorry, who is a British believer and came here straight from the Spanish civil war. But his wife, um,

who just, Isabel Crook, who just passed away about six months ago, she was born in Chengdu and her mother started the first Montessori school in Chengdu. So she was, if she passed away, she was probably born in 19...

I'm going to 1915. Maybe she was over a hundred when she passed away. Well, no, she must've been 19, 18, 20, something like that. And, but her, her family had been in Chengdu for at least a generation before that. So I can't say I know a lot of people like that, but Isabel and David's son, Michael Crook is still living in Beijing. And,

And he is one of the founders of the Western Academy of Beijing and still making contributions in the third generation. So, yeah. So Beijing doesn't have a large number of those kind of people, although there were some when I first got here.

Not not generational, but people who had been living here and making contributions since the 30s and 40s. Given that you want you're hoping your kids come back to Beijing someday, maybe in the future, people looking back will see your family as the American roots here in Beijing.

Right. Yes, I would be very proud. Thank you so much for your time and taking time out of your very busy schedule to meet with us today and share how our two nations can better understand each other and about your life and your business here in China. It's my pleasure, Jason. Thank you. Thank you.