A Week in Beijing: Five SEESALT Consultants at CIDGA’s International Summer School

SEESALT consultants Wen Xin, Yuqing Bai, Zhijun He, Qianli Xu, and Yilun Wang with Professor Xu Xiuli, College of International Development and Global Agriculture, China Agricultural University, July 2026.

In July, five of us found ourselves in the same building in Beijing for the first time.

We had come from five campuses — New Haven, Ithaca, New York, Boston, and Saint Paul — for the International Summer School on Country & Regional Studies and Global Development at China Agricultural University’s College of International Development and Global Agriculture (CIDGA). Some of us had known each other since Macalester; some of us had only ever met on a SEESALT call. For a week, we shared lecture halls, field visits, late-night draft edits, and a roundtable stage.

The program asks a question that sits close to SEESALT’s own: how does knowledge about development actually travel — between countries, between generations, between the people who study a place and the people who live there? Students and early-career researchers from China and abroad spent the week working through that question in seminars and fieldwork, and presenting their own research to the cohort at the end.

When the program announced its ten outstanding participants, four SEESALT consultants were on the list:

• Qianli Xu — first-year MA/PhD student at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences — was ranked first in the program.

• Yuqing Bai — PhD student, New York University

• Zhijun He — MA candidate, Yale University, and SEESALT’s founder, who also helped run the program’s flagship roundtable on global development exchange

• Wen Xin — undergraduate, Macalester College

Yilun Wang — Boston University — rounded out our group of five as a participant.

We are proud of all of them, but the number that matters most to us is not four out of ten. It is that every consultant on that list is still a student. SEESALT was founded in 2018 on the idea that the best guidance comes from people who are still learning in public — not from advisors who stepped out of academic life years ago, but from students and researchers doing the work right now, who can tell a high-schooler what a seminar room feels like because they were in one last Tuesday.

A week in Beijing was a small reminder that this idea holds. Our thanks to CIDGA and its faculty for the invitation, and to Qianli, Yuqing, Zhijun, Wen, and Yilun for representing SEESALT the way they did.