China’s drive to expand the reach and quality of higher education is receiving quiet but determined support from an attic office in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

This is the modest home of Bridge to Asia, a non profit organisation with the less modest aim of giving China and other developing countries open access to the West’s accumulated learning. Since 1987, the organisation has shipped more than six million English language books to Chinese university libraries. It is now also sending books to Vietnam, and is embarking on a new project to despatch collections that encompass the ‘core knowledge’ of a range of disciplines.

For Bridge to Asia founders, Newton Liu and Jeffrey Smith, this is not merely intellectual charity, sending crumbs of surplus information abroad. Rather, they see their efforts as a step towards redressing global inequities in the distribution of knowledge, held in place by “regressive intellectual property regimes”.

The organisation grew out of a friendship formed between Liu and Smith when they were both teaching at a university in Chengdu in 1984. Liu, a native of Shaanxi Province, taught polymer science; Smith, a Californian graduate of Harvard, taught English. The pair became jogging partners and Smith recalls that, running through the campus one morning “We saw this girl, a student, sitting outside reading a book at 6 a.m. -- and it was snowing! She could only get the book out overnight and was determined to finish it. I had never seen anyone in the US or Europe caring that much about a book. Another time, in a library in Beijing, I saw a teacher from the countryside hand-copying a book. He worked at it the whole summer.”

Liu, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, saw China’s stock of foreign language books devastated by Red Guards. “They destroyed the libraries, and tore the covers off the books. My older brother brought lots back for fuel: books published in the 1930s. I remember the strange line drawings of Newton and Copernicus.”

Although schooled in chemistry, Liu gained a place at the University of California at Berkeley to study for a PhD and wrote a dissertation on Cultural Revolution poetry. In 1989 he was one of around 80,000 Chinese students in the United States to be offered a green card under the Chinese Students Protection Act. Now, as well as working for Bridge to Asia, he is involved in a project to document and translate poetry scratched on the barrack walls of San Francisco’s ‘Angel Island’, where Chinese immigrants were interned, in some cases for several years, under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The walls, says Liu, are “full of poems about homesickness and being beaten down.”

Before founding Bridge to Asia, Smith spent a year working on another book donation programme. There are about thirty such schemes in the United States but he concluded that most are largely supply driven, dealing in publishers’ remainders, or sending the right material to the wrong places. “I’ve seen book dumping in the Philippines and Laos, for example: donated books that have never been opened, physical chemistry books in mountain provinces in the Philippines where no-one teaches physical chemistry.”

Smith and Liu decided, therefore, to concentrate on academic journals and quality, second-hand books whose value was shown by the fact that someone had been willing to pay for them. The programme has declined offers from publishers to clear warehouses of books they can’t sell. “We were offered 50,000 copies of a Ross Perot book, notes Liu, “but we turned them down.”

Principal donors have been wholesalers of used books, campus bookstores, academic societies and individuals. “The material is there”, says Smith. “There are billions of books sitting on shelves in the United States. And there’s enormous good will. We’ve had retiring professors who have packed up their lifetime collections in Pennsylvania and driven them in trucks to Chicago”.

From donated warehouse space in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Lincoln, Nebraska, the books are shipped to three universities, in Shanghai, Qingdao and Dalian, which serve as distribution centres. The Chinese Ministry for Education covers international shipping, and the distribution centres recover their costs by charging 12 yuan (USD 1.5) per volume for the books they send out, on a request basis, to university libraries across the country.

The success of the programme depends significantly on the receptiveness and initiative of librarians in individual universities. “If an individual’s got the passion for the mission, then that person’s organisation reflects it”, says Smith. He cites the China Agriculture University as an example of an “open shelf institution with wonderful journal collections and very well trained librarian assistants,” but stresses that institutions across China have benefited from the programme. According to Smith, their partners in the Chinese Ministry of Education estimate that during the last five years Bridge to Asia has provided more than half of all foreign language texts acquired by Chinese university libraries.

Liu adds that “the Ministry of Education asked us to help with librarians’ training. There’s a need for that, but at present we don’t have the capacity.”

Bridge to Asia is now starting a new project to identify and supply core texts in 25 fields of study. They estimate that the basic knowledge and insights of each field are contained in between one and two thousand volumes. American university librarians and academics are helping to draw up lists of such key texts in, initially, Clinical Medicine, Law, Engineering, Art History and Religious Studies. Bridge to Asia will then buy and ship the collections to key universities in China. This project has received funding support from the Henry Luce Foundation, which was established in 1936 by the co-founder of Time magazine, who grew up in China, where his parents worked as missionaries.

Also planned is a website where individuals can pledge donations. To extend the reach of such a facility, Liu and Smith hope to develop some kind of linkage with an e-commerce retailer such as Barnes & Noble or Amazon. They are meanwhile looking for a new book collection centre in Seattle, and forming a group of ‘Bay Area Friends of Bridge’ to raise the organisation’s profile and gather more widespread support.

Bridge to Asia sees access to international knowledge as an essential component of China’s modernisation and global integration, but recognises formidable structural barriers. Smith notes that: “Hard as we try to help bridge the gap, most of our efforts are work-arounds, forced on us all by regressive intellectual property regimes that make access to formal knowledge too costly for most scholars and others in China to afford. The producers of the knowledge in the western academic world want their colleagues in China to have this, but the knowledge industry privatises it and charges first world prices for it. It puts us in mind of the AIDS victims in Africa, where the pharmaceutical companies were insisting on first world prices for their drugs.”

Smith advocates copyright releases for essential materials that capture the basic knowledge in a subject, or agreements by publishers and authors to provide materials at heavily discounted rates. “Physicians, architects, lawyers, engineers, historians should all demand that their counterparts in developing countries be provided unencumbered access to the knowledge that defines the professions.”

The much-vaunted ‘ICT revolution’, he argues, has failed to achieve the breadth of affordable access to knowledge and information that many people had predicted. Impressive on-line collections certainly exist, but copyright protections and high subscription fees limit access for scholars and students from developing countries.

“The solution is moral, not technological” Bridge to Asia’s website states. “Until knowledge is treated as a public good rather than a commodity, and access is made affordable, developing countries will continue to fall behind, and the Internet will continue to increase rather than decrease the knowledge gap.”

In a striking reversal of popular images of China as a violator of intellectual property rights, Smith notes that “China invented both paper and movable type [using ceramic, rather than metal]. If they’d only patented those, every time we turn a page, we’d have to pay a nickel.”

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