This week on Sinica, Kaiser is live at the Princeton US-China Coalition Global Governance Forum, where he speaks with Gao Yutong (Tony Gao) about the wunderkind entrepreneur’s experience as a Chinese student in the U.S. from age 16 to his present 23. Gao is the founder and CEO of Easy Transfer, which Chinese students use to pay their college tuition from Chinese bank accounts without all the hassle, paperwork, and expensive fees. He was named last year to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.
Gao talks about his time amidst the cornfields (in his sophomore year of high school, he attended an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Lincoln, Nebraska), his stint as president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of Southern California, and how students from China might prepare themselves better for the experience of study in the U.S.
If you like this episode, be sure to check out — or re-listen — to another recent episode: The Chinese student experience in America, with Siqi Tu and Eric Fish.
Recommendations:
Gao: A recommendation for college students to pick the thing they like most. Also, to take the advice of Jack Ma: “When you are 20 to 30 years old, you should follow a good boss [and] join a good company to learn how to do things properly. When you are 30 to 40 years old, if you want to do something yourself, just do it. You still can afford to lose, to fail. When you’re 40 to 50 years old, my suggestion is you should do things you are good at. When you are 50 to 60 years old, spend time training and developing young people, the next generation. When you are over 60 years old, you better stay with your grandchildren.”
Kaiser: The podcast of the UPenn Center for the Study of Contemporary China, specifically, the recent episode with Damien Ma on China’s political economy.
