ST. LOUIS – Kate Casas, the senior director of government relations for the Gate Way Group, will travel across the Pacific Ocean in October to tour the People’s Republic of China after earning a coveted fellowship.
The longtime lobbyist was chosen as one of 10 people from around the nation to participate in the 2015 Zhi-Xing Eisenhower Fellowship program. The Eisenhower Fellowship program, founded in the 1950s, aims to bridge divides between nations by sending representative middle career professionals from the United States to foreign countries and vice versa.
Casas says the program is designed to foster understanding between the two nations involved.
“They really focus on personal development, but also what sorts of things can they bring back to their community,” she said. “I fully understand that their government is very different from ours, but I think both of us have a lot of things to learn from one another.
“There’s certainly an effort being made to improve relations,” she added, citing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s current visit to the United States.
Casas’ own visit will see her analyzing and learning from various education platforms around China, and how the United States may be able to adapt the methods of the world’s emerging superpowers into something that works stateside. She believes China, one of the world’s fastest developing countries, has a lot of lessons to offer the United States.
“[China is] growing at such a rapid rate they really had to make several overhauls to their education system in the last couple of decades,” she said. “They’ve taken a lot of insight in business and technology and tried to meet the demands of their growing population.
“They have four or five times the number of people on the internet than the United States at any given time. How do you build the infrastructure to support that?”
Early next month, Casas will travel to Philadelphia for cultural orientation before leaving for Beijing, where she will spend her first week. After that, she will spend time in rural China, evaluating rural schools and towns before travelling to Shanghai.
Casas will be joined by nine other fellows representing different industries and businesses, and she’s excited to take her first trip to one of the oldest nations on Earth.
“I think it is incredible how old and rich their history is,” she said. “I really want to be immersed in that and understand the deep culture and history and how the country’s gotten to where it is.”
