Jiang Xueqin is Deputy Principal at Shenzhen Middle School [1], China’s leading center for progressive education reform. His main responsibilities are the consolidation of Principal Wang Zheng’s education reforms, student recruitment, and external relations.
From September 2008 to October 2009, Mr. Jiang was Director of the Special Curriculum [2], a program that aimed to prepare Chinese students for American universities. The Special Curriculum has two crucial elements. Its reading program develops the student’s ability to read critically in English, and its directed activities teach students to work in a team. The Special Curriculum’s three main activities are its daily newspaper [3], an English magazine called the “Green Room”, and a for-profit business called the Coffeehouse.
Mr. Jiang was born in 1976 in Taishan, Guangdong province. At the age of six he and his family immigrated to Toronto, Canada. He attended Yale College, where he graduated in 1999 with distinction in the English literature major.
In 1998, Mr. Jiang taught English at Peking University High School. The man who hired him was Vice-Principal Wang Zheng, who a decade later would hire Mr. Jiang to start the Special Curriculum at Shenzhen Middle School.
After graduating from Yale, Mr. Jiang taught a year at Beijing Number Four High School before becoming a free-lance journalist. His articles have appeared in the Nation, Far Eastern Economic Review, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Science Monitor. In 2001 he became the China correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education. On June 3, 2002, in Daqing in northern China, Mr. Jiang was arrested while on a PBS assignment to film a worker protest.[4] While not formally charged, he was deported from China.
Since then Mr. Jiang has worked as a documentary film-maker, making two independent documentaries. The first “Unseen China” (2003)[5] is about the link between poverty and corruption in China, and is based on Mr. Jiang’s print reporting. The second “Children of Blessing” (2005)[6] is about a class of ethnic minority girls in a Chinese school. In 2004, Sveriges Television (SVT) in Sweden commissioned Mr. Jiang to report for a documentary about the ship-wrecking industry in China.
In 2006 Mr. Jiang Xueqin worked as a Public Information Officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
Mr. Jiang blogs about education reform at www.jiangxq.com[7], and he regularly writes book and movie reviews on amazon.com.