Alumni Spotlight: Li Shuo of Greenpeace

Li Shuo

HNC students learn about global issues from their peers’ perspectives by living, eating, and studying together while working in their target language, meaning that Chinese students take courses primarily in English, while international students take most of their courses in Chinese.

Many of these students immediately impact their communities, like Li Shuo HNC’10, who joined Greenpeace after leaving the HNC and in 2013 led an unprecedented environmental investigation of one of the largest Chinese coal producers and politically powerful state-owned enterprises, Shenhua Group.

Asked about the HNC’s impact on him, Li says, “Many of the key skills and knowledge required in my daily work now find their roots in the HNC. This could not be encapsulated anywhere better than in the HNC’s library and its role in developing my fascination with books - even after three decades of reform and opening up, the HNC's library still is one of the few places in Mainland China that hosts such a comprehensive collection in the school's specialized academic fields. For an international-studies major, it was in this bonanza that I discovered my interest in bilingual reading and writing, which turned out to be of immense value to my career and life.”

With his cultural and lingual fluency honed at the HNC, Li guided a multinational non-profit to respect the unique characteristics of Chinese business and politics and affect multilaterally beneficial change, persuading Shenhua to stop pumping groundwater for use in its plant in Inner Mongolia and forcing a strategic adjustment to the development of an industry that carries tremendous global climate-change implications. He and hundreds of others like him promise a brighter future for the U.S. and China together.