Jason R.B. Smith is the host of The Bridge to China Podcast, which airs on the radio in cities in China with more than 130 million people, in half a dozen other countries, and online. Jason earned a master’s degree in Modern World History from San Francisco State University and has lived in Asia since 2010. Smith published A World Beyond Poverty: China’s Roadmap to a Shared Future in 2025, which focuses on China-aided infrastructure projects in the underdeveloped world.
From the ashes of extreme poverty to blue skies and booming villages, discover how China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. When Jason arrived in Beijing in 2012, he saw beggars, coal-filled air, trash-filled rivers, and villages without plumbing. By 2020, the skies were blue, the rivers clean, and extreme poverty had been eradicated across the world’s most populous nation. Skeptical of headlines, Smith spent years traveling to every province of China, including dozens of the poorest villages. In this honest, firsthand account, he takes you deep into the villages, towns, and cities where the transformation happened, not through dry statistics, but through the people, places, and stories he witnessed himself.
What is China really doing in the underdeveloped world? Massive investments in ports, schools, roads, bridges, and hospitals under the Belt and Road Initiative are raising eyebrows in the West, but developing countries are asking for more. Learn the real reasons why. Jason RB Smith has constructed the first large-scale compendium of Belt and Road Initiative projects, sampling a variety of aid- and financed infrastructure in more than 100 countries around the world.
This volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary examination of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners from Africa, China, and beyond, the book situates FOCAC within the broader trajectory of China-Africa relations. Jason RB Smith contributes a chapter entitled Sino-African Cooperation: The End of Underdevelopment, which demonstrably shows China working with African partners to develop the requisite infrastructure to create the conditions for sustained development.
https://www.amazon.com/author/jasonrbsmith