About MIT-CHIEF

Reflecting China's past achievements and looking forward, we believe great opportunities for the world lie amid the challenges China faces today. Ideas and solutions from both within China and abroad will be needed to face the many challenges on the road to China's development. We intend to host a high-profile forum to address these key issues in technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in China, providing a platform upon which high-impact discussions and collaborations can take place.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a hotspot of scientific research where technologies are constantly taking shape to address real-world challenges. As China faces many such challenges today, we believe this is an ideal time to provide an interactive discussion forum between China and researchers at MIT. We also believe that the core values established by MIT's founder William Barton Rogers 150 years ago—inventional wisdom, useful work founded on science, hands-on learning, meritocracy and hardwork, and service—have great potential to advance and develop China's future.

Past, Present, and Future

China's rapid economic growth over the past 30 years has drawn not only global attention but also uplifted the lives of many domestically. For many, those years of economic development brought many into modern and affluent lifestyles. For the country as a whole, those were the years of committing to a national strategy of reforms and opening up on a global scale with confidence and promise. However, China is now at a key turning point of its development: a time when the country's energy demands are rapidly increasing, a time when millions of people still suffer from the lack of clean water and safe food, and a threat of slowed economic growth, when the advantages of being the manufacturing center of the world are slowly fading away. An innovation-oriented economy and a healthy, growing domestic market have yet to be built.

Standing at these crossroads, China faces unprecedented challenges in pursuing sustainable development and simultaneously continuing to be a driving force of the world’s economy. China's National Twelfth Five-Year Development Plan (2010-2015) reemphasizes the importance of technology and innovation and presses for strengthening and expanding international cooperation. We believe that the new round of international cooperation between China and the rest of world will further accelerate the modernization of China. As students from China in the United States, we are enthusiastic and thrilled to become a part of this historic mission.

Forum Program

The basic structure of the forum will be two-day annually-held conference. We plan to invite leading authorities from academia, industries, enterprises, businesses and the government institutions, from both China and the US, to deliver presentations and showcase their work at MIT. We will address not only the current development and potential collaborations of technologies and enterprises in the US and China in areas such as clean technology, information technology, health care and biotechnology, but also the related policies and future directions China should take for continued future development in innovation and entrepreneurship.

We strongly believe that we can make a big impact through such a conference and that all participating parties can benefit much from this forum. The components of the conference will be

• Keynote Speeches
• Panel Discussions
• Entrepreneurship Contest
• Technology Showcases
• Networking Sessions