2018 OYCF Annual Meeting successfully concluded on Saturday, May 26, at Morgan Run Golf & Resort in San Diego, California. Over 80 participants, including senior China scholars, students, professionals, and community members from the U.S., Canada and China participated in the discussion at the annual meeting. 

2018 marks the 40th anniversary of China's opening up and economic reform.  Participants heard from three distinguished speakers about the genesis and early history of the reform from economists Gregory Chow (Princeton) and China historian Julian Gewirtz (Harvard). 

In the afternoon session, Scott Rozelle (Stanford) gave a sobering assessment of the future of reform in a speech  entitled "China’s Invisible Crisis: How a Growing Rural-Urban Divide could Sink the World’s Second Largest Economy." 

The Annual Meeting also recognized four recipients of the OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China.  The four recipients are all Phd students from various humanities and social science fields.  They are Jiling Duan (Indiana University), Peter Hicks (Stanford University), Kevin Luo (University of Toronto) and Di Wang (University of Wisconsin). Gregory and Paula Chow presented the fellowship awards to the recipients.

Finally, OYCF held its third "social innovation contest" in the afternoon. OYCF invited three non-profit organizations from China to present their work at the annual meeting. After an extended Q&A period and discussions among the meeting attendees, OYCF awarded the 2018 Award of Excellence to Clover, a students-run program providing peer counseling and companionship to migrant children attending schools in the cities.  Two additional Awards of Merit were presented to ProSigner, an organization promoting the welfare of the deaf population in China, and to Zero Waste Villages, an initiative to deal with the rampant solid waste problems in rural China. 

OYCF members also heard from the Forum's current president, Professor Sida Liu (Toronto), about the state of OYCF.