Ming Jiu Li

B.S.E. Environmental Engineering, Duke University

Ming has years of working semesters, summers, and our Bridge Year Princeton courses in China. Ming was born in southwest China, did kindergarten in Chengdu, Sichuan, and moved to Singapore when he was six with his family. After finishing high school, and two years of mandatory military service in Singapore, Ming moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he spent the next three years doing the minimal to obtain his engineering degree, and instead devoted the bulk of his time to an internship with the Women’s Center, working on gender justice activism and community organizing.

Ming’s time moving around the world has come full circle, for now: in his first three years out of college, he was based in Chengdu, living rent-free with family and working with an NGO committed to the protection of rivers and the environment. Over this time, Ming grasped a broad overview of the environmental and social challenges facing modern China, and through his current travels in disparate parts of China, wishes to build a larger context for examining and understanding China’s development. Most recently, Ming works at the Qiantian International School in Kunming.

Ming is seeking greater rootedness in his country of birth, and in his work with students, hopes to regularly live by Simone Weil’s quote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”