Bridge to Asia -- Mission

Bridge to Asia is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that supports the modernization of higher education in developing countries in Asia, principally China.

In our main effort, we provide books, journals, monographs, databases and other educational materials that are essential for teaching and research but too costly for most schools or scholars to afford. In related efforts, we have used the Internet to help professionals in China consult with their counterparts in the U.S.

Our work is made possible by the generosity and good will of 5,000 individual and institutional donors who have given nearly 10 million books over 22 years, more than half of the foreign academic materials acquired by China's universities in that time.

Hunger for Books in the East

Even in the age of the Internet, books can be the most practical means of obtaining formal knowledge. Yet in Beijing or Hanoi, the price of a book in Western medicine may equal the monthly salary of a doctor. The cost to provide bare minimum libraries to China's 150 medical schools is beyond the means of the Ministry of Public Health.

Access to Western knowledge is so limited that medical schools struggle to upgrade themselves, in a primitive health-care system that is nearing collapse. Law schools struggle to train fully capable graduates.

It is the same for most fields and practices, and the result is a calamity: faculty cannot keep current - students do not learn what they should - and the system cannot produce enough well-trained people to sustain the modernization of the country.

Bounty of Books in the West

Most of the materials wanted in China can be found in the United States where many of their owners are willing to share them with people and places in need. Billions of books are printed each year, but most are read only once; individuals and institutions are downsizing and digitizing their libraries; and there is a wave of retiring professors. All of the above help make available a surplus of books, journals, databases, magazines, sheet music, maps, and more.

The Bridge

Bridge to Asia provides the infrastructure to acquire the best materials and deliver them to people who can best use them. We solicit donations from used book wholesalers, publishers, college bookstores, faculty, students and the reading public. We conduct book-drives nationally and locally, including at universities. We receive books at warehouses in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles. Finally, through a system overseen by the Ministry of Education, we distribute books to a total of 1000 universities from Shanghai to Tibet.

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