BEIJING, Nov. 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from China.org.cn on Brown 's stories with China:

Brown 's stories with Chinahttps://youtu.be/Zi5W0XKzDW8

Xiamen University business professor William Brown is not a Chinese but an old China hand. He moved to China from the US with his wife and sons in 1988.

His only regret is that he didn't come sooner. Why did he choose to come to China?

Actually, when he was a kid, he had no interest in China. In his childhood, he didn't learn anything about Asian culture or history.

In the 1980s, he used to read "China Today". Back then, the magazine was called "China Reconstructs". The magazine told about China's developments, the reform and opening-up, and improvements in many aspects. Brown wanted to see whether what it said was true. So he came to Xiamen City in southeast China.

In 1994, Brown drove his family across some 40,000 kilometers in China and made a point of visiting several poverty-stricken regions.

He recorded his experiences on China through letters to his family members in the US over the past decades. These letters home helped the Brown's family see an open and developing China.

In July 2019, Brown, along with professors and students from Xiamen University, made a 32-day 20,000 km drive around China to revisit the places he'd seen in 1994 and to gauge the pace of the country's changes.

"I was surprised when I traveled to remote places in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Gansu province back in 1994 that the government had already started building roads to remote villages," Brown said.

When he revisited those remote places last year, he was impressed to see that the government had continued to develop even the poorest areas. "Every place we visited, from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the north to the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, Gansu, Qinghai province and the Tibet autonomous region in the west, had beautiful concrete roads," he said.

Brown said despite China's changes, some people still have biased views of the nation. To counter those views, he said, it is important to tell the stories of ordinary Chinese people to let them share how their lives have changed.

"The only way to understand China is to understand the Chinese people themselves," Brown said.

The Cultural Sit-Down with Wang Xiaohuihttp://cul.china.com.cn/node_1008104.htm 

Brown 's stories with Chinahttps://www.facebook.com/chinaorgcn/videos/343369718274453/https://twitter.com/chinaorgcn/status/1722040958278340858