Congratulations! In the face of a very difficult selection process, one of your photos was selected to be included in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia University’s Photography Society’s upcoming exhibition. This is a strong testimony to your talent, as we received over 130 photos submitted and had room for only 25. The jury was very impressed by your work and looks forward to including it in the exhibition.

The photo the jury selected is “Sewing and Reaping.”

The Opening Reception for Views In: Undergraduates Photograph a Year in East and Southeast Asia will be on Tuesday, October 13 from 5-7PM. The location is the exhibition space itself, on the 4th floor mezzanine of the International Affairs Building. I hope that those of you in New York will be able to attend and bring your friends (and family if possible)! I expect to have postcard invitations for the exhibition and opening reception by the end of the week.

Yes, I know the title wasn’t very creative.

While I’m glad they picked this one to showcase, I was quite surprised that my other submissions were not taken, especially my North Korea portfolio – some of which I thought were also visually striking. Perhaps it was too ‘current’. At least this one will make it to the 4th floor of SIPA. Hopefully it will get placed on the corridor outside the main auditorium, where the most traffic is.

The short blurb I came up with:
“Balinyouqi, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, PRC. Mrs. Zheng is a client of the Chifeng Zhaowuda Women’s Sustainable Development Association (赤峰市昭乌达妇女可持续发展协会), a local microfinance institution I visited with Wokai Microfinance. After her husband was laid off from a state-owned construction enterprise, she became the family’s primary breadwinner. She used her first loan to upgrade her pedal-operated sewing machine to an electric one, increasing her productivity, and employ other women in her tailoring business, creating jobs and training others in her trade.”

Unfortunately they didn’t give me a lot of space to tell her whole story, so I had to condense it to the bare essentials like who, what, where, emphasizing how she overcame difficulties with support for investment (or maybe consumption smoothing), and how to help others like her. Hopefully Wokai and its clients will get a little more attention through my efforts.

Dear readers, you’re probably aware I’m involved with a China microfinance nonprofit, but just in case you aren’t:

What is Wokai?

Wokai delivers an internet microfinance platform that allows individuals to provide Chinese microentrepreneurs with loan capital. Our organization acts as an intermediary in this process, transferring funds from contributors abroad to microentrepreneurs in China through our field partners. Watch our video presentation!

Who does Wokai support?

A typical Wokai microentrepeneur is a female rural inhabitant, living on less than $1/day. Her microfinance loan, ranging from $150-$300 dollars, provides her with the capital to start a small business. Her business varies by location, raising sheep in a rural grassland or operating a small fruit stand in a city center.

With her income, she accumulates savings, which allows her to allocate money towards long-term investments like education and health. By the end of her loan cycle, she has experienced increased financial independence, bolstered self-confidence, and a strengthened sense of community.

Learn more and contribute today at http://www.wokai.org.

Zemanta will be giving away $6000 (split) to the five charities who get blogged about the most before June 6. Please help us reblog and spread the word about Wokai!

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Since I was staying with a friend who goes to the Foreign Affairs University, I had quite a walk every morning to take the subway to the Wokai office, and on the way there was a BOC branch office, and right outside was a covered area where homeless people congregated to play chess and chat. The one I noticed the most was this old man, who was always there reading a newspaper. He had a dog (everyone in Beijing has dogs, even homeless people!) and when I was walking back late at night from the subway, I would see them cuddled there asleep.

About a month before the Olympics, I noticed that they weren’t there anymore. I asked my friend about it, and he said they might have been given a place to stay for a while, to keep the Beijing 2008 image up. I was worried that something more… sinister might have happened. This is China, after all. Since I left Beijing before the Olympics ended, I never did find out if he and his dog ended up squatting back at the same spot, or if the urban safety net kicked in full-time.

One time we were taking the subway somewhere, and this little handicapped kid, couldn’t have been older than nine or ten, came into the subway car asking for a handout. Living in New York has inoculated me against panhandlers and their stories, but he just looked so pitiful, so I reached for my pocket. My friend glared at me. “What are you doing? They’re professionals!” I guess growing up in China inoculates you against panhandlers too.

Maybe he was, maybe like the ones in Slumdog Millionaire. Afterwards I felt bad about not giving something, after all the RMB was almost nothing to me anyway – it was equivalent to going without a cup of coffee before class. But I can’t give to all of them, and I can’t give forever.

One of the best things about going to an ivy school is the chance to listen to world leaders that come to campus quite frequently. Recently, Muhammad Yunus came to talk about the Grameen Bank and his new book on ‘creating a world without poverty’, and I managed to get into the lecture theatre before it completely filled up. I got one of the last few available seats, and there were hundreds of people in line outside (including a Bangladeshi friend) that were quite upset about the seating capacity. Here are my notes from his speech:

He described the origins of the Grameen Bank from when he was teaching economics at university and saw the disparity between the affluent campus and the poverty just outside. He first noticed the activities of the loansharks in the villages, and studied them, collecting the names of 42 borrowers with $27 in loans. He decided to buy out their debt to free them from the loansharks, but he couldn’t do this for everyone on his own salary. He approached the bank on campus, which refused explaining that the poor were not creditworthy. He offered himself as a guarantor, and was told that he would end up bearing the defaulted debt. As it turns out, they repaid their loans and the rest is history.

The early days of Grameen: As he knew very little about how banks operated, he looked at what they did – and did the opposite instead. Instead of serving the wealthy in urban areas, GB served the rural poor. Instead of men, GB served women. Instead of requiring collateral, GB didn’t ask for any. GB stats: 7.5m borrowers, 97% of which are women, with 98-99% repayment rates. Then he made kind of a cheap shot at the conventional banks whose collateralized operations were nonetheless not creditworthy.

Special GB programs: After many years of GB emphasis that its clients should send their kids to school, it turned out that many client children were at the top of their classes, and went on from primary school to secondary school and then qualified for college but couldn’t pay tuition. GB started an education loan program, where “students can let Grameen Bank worry about the money”. The program has some 34k students in university. Now when seeing the clients and their families, there is this juxtaposition of illiterate clients and their highly educated children who are doctors and the like. He believes that the only difference between the parent and child are the opportunities that were available to them.

Thus he believes that everyone has unlimited potential and it is wrong to say that some are entrepreneurial (and thus benefit from microcredit) and that others are not. So GB started a new program only for beggars, those at the last stage of survival. GB provides a loan to a beggar to carry merchandise for sale as they beg from door to door, so that they offer households more options to donate or make a purchase or both/either. This loan charges no interest and has no maturity date, yet beggars still repay them to qualify for a bigger loan.

The program started small, with a maximum of 1 beggar client per loan officer, but as it proved incredibly popular among GB staff, all 28k loan officers had one. The maximum increased to 4, and there are now more than 100k beggars enrolled. 11k of them have since graduated from beggarhood to become salesmen, some are now personal shoppers for housewives. “The wife tells the husband to get something from the market, but as usual the husband forgets.” The remaining 90k are ‘part-time beggars’, and know which households are better for begging or selling. “They never attended business school but they understand market segmentation.”

GB America: He believes 98% of humanity is the same, so GB sent one of its Bangladesh staff to New York to start the US program in Jackson Heights, exactly the way it works in Bangladesh – no collateral or credit history required. “We are not interested in our clients’ past. We are interested in their future.” It now has 500+ women in the program, average loan size $2200 and a 99.3% repayment rate.

Social enterprises: He described a few GB joint ventures. One with Danone is a yogurt venture to address malnourishment. The product is a cheap fortified yogurt, which restores all necessary nutrients over 8-9 months of 2 per week consumption. The venture pays no dividends, investors can recoup their initial investment but no more than that. Another venture with Veolia addresses the arsenic contaminated water supply. The venture built a water treatment plant to sell cheap, safe drinking water, piped to clients and sold by the liter at the tap. No marketing, packaging, bottling, just the basics. Another venture produces nutrition supplements, another treated mosquito nets.

Social investment capital markets: He believes that government alone cannot solve all of society’s problems, and it is a slow machine, whereas individuals are much faster. Social ventures and businesses don’t need to be big to make an impact, there just needs to be a lot of them. Thus he wants to have a ‘social stock market’ to finance these ventures, and wants to see ventures in health insurance and consumer finance.

Q&A: Social joint ventures legal implications. Having joint ventures with public companies can be problematic because the firm managers have fiduciary duties to their shareholders, who might take issue with the firm making non-profitable investments. While Danone managers were enthusiastic about the venture, they couldn’t use company money for it. So at the AGM, while dividends were announced, they issued a notice to shareholders about the venture, and offered the shareholders the choice of whether to direct their dividend to finance it. 98% of shareholders said yes. Other firms can direct their CSR funds if available.

Q&A: Role of the government. Other than financing social ventures, regulatory bodies can accredit the socialness of ventures for special tax status. GB is able to lend over 1bn a year because it can leverage deposits like any other bank, and each branch of GB is self-reliant for funding, with local money going to local borrowers, and local profits returning to local shareholders. However, in many countries where MFIs are just NGOs without banking licenses, they can’t take deposits and are reliant on grants. This is the same in Jackson Heights where over 1m has been lent, but they can’t lent any more without deposits, and the banking license costs 30m.

Q&A: MF commercialization. “Microfinance was born for a purpose, to help people, not to become loansharks ourselves using the name of microfinance.” He explained the need of a guiding principle on interest rates, where the ‘green zone’ should be cost-of-funds plus 10%, the ‘yellow zone’ 10-15%, and anywhere more than that the ‘red zone’.

Before going to China, I had considered acquiring RMB from the banks in New York, but decided that the exchange rate would have been poorer since the supply of RMB here would have been very limited. So I brought a stack of US dollars to China with the expectation that I would exchange it there. But when I arrived at Beijing’s terminal 3, I found that the moneychangers there were offering a terrible rate, so I resolved to go out into the city and find a better one.

I found a BOC branch downtown and asked the teller about the rate, and suitably satisfied, I handed by stack of bills over. The teller proceeded to scrutinize each and every bill from all angles, holding it up to the light, feeling every part of it. After intense scrutiny, he rejected the more worn bills and told me he would only exchange the ‘good’ ones. I thought, they probably don’t see too many hundred dollar bills around here, and left it at that. After that, I went to Citibank and got it done.

It was only later that I realized what the teller was doing to my money. We (Wokai interns and officemates) were out for lunch, and walking around the hutong looking for a new place to try. We ended up in a noodle restaurant, and on the wall I saw the above notice. I pulled out my own 100 RMB note to try to compare it to the counterfeit bills, but couldn’t see the difference. A local colleague explained that the way to tell was to ‘feel Chairman Mao’s hair’, as the texture of the bill was finer there. I hadn’t realized counterfeiting was so pervasive in China.

Now I knew why the bank teller was stroking Ben Franklin’s wizened face.

Despite the ‘one dog policy’, Beijingers still have a lot of dogs. There must be at least a million small dogs in the city – maybe there are more dogs than kids. I walk by dozens every day on my way to work, and usually none of them are leashed. They just roam around while the owner walks behind. You have to be careful because they leave plenty of deposits everywhere (surprising for their size), and dog owners don’t seem to pick up after.

I hardly see any big dogs around. It could be simply the popularity of smaller breeds, but my fellow intern tells me that the one dog policy also stipulates a maximum size. I did see one large Dalmatian roaming around the inside of a hutong compound, as if hiding from the prying eyes of the authorities. I wonder if people’s preference for smaller breeds is because of enforcement of the size restrictions, or if there is lax enforcement due to a general preference for smaller breeds. I lean towards the latter explanation; I suspect that while enforcement is discretionary, as it is in most other cases, the local purchasing power is more suited to the upkeep of smaller breeds.

My roommate Nick, a student at the Foreign Affairs college, tells me that dogs too have a kind of hukou (residency permit). Upon registration, dogs receive an identification card with a photograph and pet name. It’s hard to imagine an ID card for Maomao the Pekingese, but this is China. Why are there so many pets? Nick says that it’s due to an empty nest syndrome, when the only child has grown up and left the household, lonely parents get a pet and often treat it like another child. It might be that in the absence of the 1CP, there might be less demand for pets.

I try to avoid telling my Korean friends in school that I went to the North, because they always look at me strangely and ask why I would ever want to go there. I don’t blame them – some have family histories and bad memories of the place. The immediate assumption is that I’m some kind of sick tourist that delights in seeing the suffering of others, or worse, that I perpetuate it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reason why I went to North Korea is the same reason why I’m a perennial attendee of all the related speaker events at the Weatherhead Institute, ran across DC to see exhibits at the Woodrow Wilson center and the Library of Congress during my lunch hour, took the train out to some church in Brooklyn to see Yodok Story, and search desperately for online DVD sales of Crossing (크로싱). It lies at the intersection of all my professional and personal interests.

My professional interest is in markets and development i.e. my college major. The DPRK presents one of the most difficult economic development challenges, especially in the transition to a market economy. It is also an important case study of underground economies and illicit trade like narcotics, counterfeiting, proliferation etc. That segues neatly into my other professional interest, political science and international relations i.e. my other major. My personal interest is in the cause of liberty. I went there to try to better understand what it means to live under an authoritarian regime, and by understanding it, try to make a difference.

At first I was hesitant to go on an ‘official’ tour. I knew that the fees charged would go directly into the regime’s hands, and that I would not see anything sensitive anyway. That tourism revenues flow directly into the hands of regime officials means that I would have personally contributed to the perpetuation of the system, and I want to be part of the solution, not the problem.

After some consideration I came to the conclusion that the benefits outweighed the costs. Hyundai Asan’s Kaesong tour business alone has brought a hundred thousand tourists to Kaesong and transferred some 10 million USD to the DPRK so far. That isn’t counting the Kumgang-san tour. And this is just Hyundai Asan – there are many more tour agencies like Koryo Tours etc.

Yes, the tour is a highly profitable business unit for the conglomerate. Perhaps it is naïve but I do not believe the conglomerate would have been allowed to operate it, if it ran counter to its national interest i.e. that ROK officials have made their calculations and found that on net, it makes sense from a national security perspective. Tourism is a more legitimate source of foreign exchange than say, proliferation and counterfeiting, and may displace the latter. It may also be a particularly effective way to undermine regime propaganda – see the photograph above.

Since there is a state monopoly on tourism operation, they can price discriminate, and they base this on country of origin. Koryo Tours, Koreakonsult and other agencies that cater to Westerners charge many thousands of dollars/euros – way above my budget and far more than I was willing to contribute to the regime. The next tier of pricing is for Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc. Still too high. I chose to minimize this by making arrangements through a Chinese agency based in Dandong, which is necessarily charged a price more appropriate to the average disposable income on the mainland. I also chose to take the train, which was a lot cheaper than flying there.

So it came to be that I followed Geoffrey’s footsteps and joined a Chinese tour group to the DPRK while I was in Beijing. Thus begin my Pyongyang Diaries.

Next time on Pyongyang Diaries: Getting There

I hate how people assume that I’m going to be an investment banker when I tell them I’m an economics major, so I’ve started to introduce myself as ‘majoring in saving the world’. I considered having that on my business cards: ‘Bachelor of Arts, Saving the World’. I even asked the dean of the college about whether I could do that officially. He asked me “do you think the world can be saved?” I couldn’t give a definite answer, so I guess I’m stuck with my current major.

With the market the way it is, I’ve been looking into grad school options. I attended an info session about the Earth Institute’s PhD program in sustainable development by one of the doctoral students.

I guess what interested me in the EI program is that it’s essentially an applied economics program with masters-level science. Because it’s an economics program, it just so happens that I have most of the required quantitative courses to be considered, so it’s within the arc of possibility. However, considering there are some 400 applicants for six spots, the level of quantitative mastery to be competitive is far beyond what I already have – think about all the econ grad school applicants applying for this.

The other skill set to be competitive is science, but since the EI program is so interdisciplinary there isn’t any science in particular. The ideal candidate would have both, but the point I got from the session was that these skill sets are usually mutually exclusive for most applicants. That is, quant-socsci-types like me typically have no science background, whereas science-types have no econ background, but as long as you have one set its fine. However, the majority of accepted candidates are quant types. Whether that means it’s more or less competitive for quant types is hard to discern without knowledge of the distribution of the applicant pool. My feeling is that it’s relatively more competitive for quants, more than it already is.

The other point I got from the session was that fieldwork, languages and experience is secondary to technical prowess, unlike say the MPA/ID and similar programs where the point is to save the world hands-on. The EI program is primarily academic and theoretical, though the jury is still out on what the real placement record for the first graduating batch is going to be i.e. are they going to be hired on the academic job market or move to the World Bank, development consultancies etc.*

Thus, it is not taken into consideration for application to the EI program. It may be that a certain level of experience in the field is required to know for sure that the EI program is for you, but it does not come into play other than to demonstrate commitment to the field and possibly some relevant skills (particularly for other doctoral programs). But at least for the EI program, some candidates are taken straight out of undergrad. The ideal candidate would have both field experience and advanced quant skills, but I hardly see anyone like that in Columbia undergrad.

The corollary to this is that many applicants aren’t actually suited for the EI program since their career goal is to do fieldwork. His words were to “get a masters, finish in two years, go save the world” instead of delaying it for five to six years.

I think that was the most important point from the session, knowing exactly what your career goals are and whether the EI program is appropriate to that. This is true for any doctoral program. He said that he was much more satisfied than his friends in traditional economics doctoral programs, but it’s still not for everyone. I found Chris Blattman’s comparison of the MPA/ID and PhD programs particularly useful, though I have my own thoughts on the tradeoff. For example, the requirements are very different, so its not really an apples to apples comparison.

* I also found Blattman’s advice on getting a PhD and saving the world really useful, he provides a lot of insight for people interested in development research. However, he (among others) notes that interdisciplinary doctoral programs (like the EI program) are disadvantaged in the academic job market. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but something to consider.

Some relevant comments from the recent Social Enterprise Conference at Columbia bschool, my emphasis added.

“If you turn in your salary to work 18 hours to do good for no money, you better have made a ton of money [before]. But can you do good every day until then? Yeah, absolutely. Get rid of the fine print. Stop making stuff out of garbage. Everybody in this room can do good starting one minute from now. Make a good decision so that the social change starts as you think about the rest of your life. Then, if you make a lot of money, maybe you want to donate some number of years to some crazy thing, but until then just be a nice guy.” Rob Wunder, Co-Founder, Yummy Earth

“I think you can start a company that makes money and does good. I am not sure if a model of social enterprise that is solely about doing good and that is not designed to make any money is scalable. It’s hard. Random, bad things happen and all of sudden you don’t have the capacity to respond. The design of the company, from the ground up, should be [geared to] doing something that makes the world better while still making money.” John Katzman, Founder and CEO, The Princeton Review and 2tor.

“A lot of people in business school ask if they should go and get skills at some consulting firm or investment bank first. I feel that at the end of the day, what’s important is that we all take a step closer to what we want to be doing. The secret is that it is much harder to find interesting work and a way to make a difference, and it takes time to get there. It’s not just in one day that you’re going to find the answer of what your social enterprise is going to be. What’s important is to take a step towards that path. And in the years when you’re just trying to make money or get skills, while those skills may help you, you should also be searching for ways to get you closer to what you want to be doing.” Jeremy Hockenstein, Founder and CEO, Digital Data Divide

The nonprofit I volunteer with, Wokai microfinance, has been selected as a finalist in the Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition on Changemakers.net. The final round is decided by online voting. It takes about five minutes to register and vote, and you can do this here, but those five minutes can change the world for us. And if you could get your network to do it too, that would be AMAZING!

Read on for why you should do this:

What Wokai is about
Wokai is a nonprofit capital intermediary for microfinance in China. Our peer-to-peer fundraising model allows individual donors to finance microentrepreneurs in rural China, where hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been left behind by the reform era, helping the poorest lift themselves out of poverty to self-sufficiency and sustainable development. For more operational details, check out our website, watch our Youtube video, or better still, glance through our competition entry.

Why vote for Wokai
Wokai is projected to achieve operational sustainability over the medium term when the P2P fundraising platform has reached a critical scale (like most tech startups). Unlike most new nonprofits, which compete for the limited pool of institutional donor funds (and are thus zero-sum), Wokai’s model is bringing new revenue streams into the sector. This is compounded by Wokai’s focus on developing the microfinance industry in China (still in that early, pre-venturecap stage) which taps on capital markets rather than donors. This approach adds value.

But in the short term, it’s running on grant funding and love, and although costs are much lower in China, they do have expenses which will scale up with operations. The Ashoka fellowship brings incredible legitimacy in the social enterprise world, and that with the potential grant funding through the competition, would be a huge break for the organization.

How I am involved
I’ve volunteered for their New York chapter for the past year now, and this summer I worked with them in Beijing and Inner Mongolia developing their social impact assessment program. Based on my experience, I believe this is a cause and an organization worth supporting – the management and staff are all highly professional and extremely dedicated people.

What you can do right now
1. Vote for Wokai. You have to vote for two other finalists, which is up to you, but I personally found ‘Mideast Youth.com’ and ‘Youth and gender development program’ rather compelling entries. Just in case you don’t want to go through all the finalists.

2. Update your Facebook status to “just voted for WOKAI: http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/staplesyv”.

3. Share the link “http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/staplesyv” on your Facebook profile, with “I voted for Wokai microfinance” in the comment section. It’s the second tab on your wall, just after ‘update status’.

4. E-mail your network copy-pasting this post.

Thanks for your support!

When I first got to Beijing, my roommate Nick, who is a licensed tour guide, wanted to show me the central business district Guomao (国贸) where there’s been quite a bit of commercial development, such as the architecturally impressive CCTV building. One of the building complexes there is Jianwai SOHO, an upmarket mostly-expatriate residential and shopping area, where the glass-and-steel towers have rooftop gardens. Posh.

That was where we had planned to eat, but on our way there from the Guomao subway station there was a construction site for one of the yet-incomplete towers, where several tents for migrant workers had been put up. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty just across the street was striking. I asked what Nick thought about it, and he said that it was truly ‘worlds apart’ (his words were 两个世界), which brought to mind the ubiquitous Beijing Olympics slogan: ‘One World, One Dream’ (同一个世界，同一个梦想). You can see this line everywhere in Beijing, as if repeating it enough times would make it true.

I too might be considered a ‘migrant worker’ (民工) in the sense that I am not a native Beijinger, but the term is usually applied to the unskilled laborers from the countryside who are hired for the many construction projects in the cities but do not possess residency status (户口) that would grant them access to social services. They live a transient, precarious existence in the margins of urban society, in order to make a living and remit needed earnings to their families at home – in other words, they share the Chinese dream of economic progress and upward mobility. ‘One dream’ is true enough, but ‘one world’? Maybe not.

An army of migrant workers? (Beijing)

On my first few nights in Beijing, I was still on Zurich time and hadn’t fully adjusted. I was still awake at three in the morning, and looked out the window to see the migrant workers toiling away on their graveyard shift. Many workers wear loose-fitting People’s Liberation Army fatigues, the camouflage patterns long faded in the wash. I was under the impression that they had been demobilized soldiers (due to the PLA modernization/force transformation campaign) but Nick informed me that was not the case: University students, who have mandatory short-term military training sessions, are required to purchase the fatigues, after which they usually dispose of them by selling them cheaply (~5 RMB) to the local villagers. Their manufacture and sale is probably heavily subsidized as well, and the fatigues can withstand the heavy-duty wear-and-tear during construction projects. This makes them suitable for and accessible to migrant workers, who have limited purchasing power. There might be some demobilized soldiers, but I can’t tell them apart.

Welcome the humanistic/peoples’ Olympics, build the harmonious schoolyard! (Suburban Beijing)

In China it’s difficult to escape the other ubiquitous catchphrase, the ‘harmonious society’ (和谐社会) – the construction of which is the declared aim of the Hu administration’s ‘scientific development concept’ (科学发展观), which was enshrined in the CCP constitution last October. As the party line descends from upper to mid-level cadres, the phrase gets repeated as a prefix everywhere: ‘harmonious’ middle schools, ‘harmonious’ office buildings, ‘harmoniously’ boarding the subway… it can get pretty absurd. Perhaps on the assumption that if you repeat something enough times it becomes true.

My office is in an old hutong (胡同), where the historical Beijing is most visible, and modern developments like Jianwai SOHO are far away. But amenities here are also undeveloped, and many households here do not have a private bathroom but use the many public ones available. Some households don’t have easy access to one; on one of my detours through tiny streets and cul-de-sacs I saw an actual cesspool.

On my walk home from work, I usually pass by a bank building with a covered section. There are always a few homeless men there with all their worldly possessions in tow sleeping there. One old man in particular has a really scruffy-looking pet; a stray dog for a stray man. Whenever I saw him reading the newspaper while his dog was playing nearby, I thought about asking him about why he was here every day. I never got the courage together to actually approach him. I don’t think he’s a migrant worker, but it seems like he doesn’t have access to social safety nets either – and this is the capital city. As time drew closer to August, I noticed that he was not at the usual place, along with his dog and all the other homeless people. I wondered if he managed to find a place to stay at during the Olympics period, or if something more sinister occurred.

Which way to the harmonious society? (Jianwai SOHO, Beijing)

Is microfinance a solution? One theory of change says yes: Migrant workers endure difficult and sometimes dangerous working conditions in the cities because prospects in the rural, inland provinces are even worse. By supporting rural employment and economic opportunities, the forces of supply and demand that push migrants out of the countryside and pull them into the construction sites may become weaker, and rebalance the incentive structure that results in their dangerous working conditions.

This is the purpose of my summer in China. I want to find out if this theory is correct, whether microfinance can help individuals lift themselves from poverty in a sustainable, cost-effective way. Will I find the answer?

To be continued.