Senior Vice President, Social Impact

Weber Shandwick China

Location: Beijing

1. Your career has centered on connecting China and the international community across health, policy, and social impact. What first inspired you to become a "bridge" between different cultures and systems? How did you get involved with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)? 

The word “bridge” came into my life before it became the name of my company. Just before graduating from university, I volunteered at a summer camp where Chinese and American teenagers spent a week living together, learning, playing, and serving the local community side by side. I saw that cross-cultural communication could change not only what people understood, but also what they believed was possible together. That experience was powerful enough that, after graduation, I joined CEO Global, the NGO that organized the camp.

Its founder, Frances Lee, became an important early example for me. She had been a successful corporate executive with experience in the United States, Hong Kong, and mainland China. Then she took the skills, discipline, and relationships she had built in business and applied them to social purpose. From her, I learned that idealism and professionalism are not opposites. If you want to serve a mission, you should bring your best management skills to it.

Later, at Global Health Strategies (GHS), I found a model that made that lesson even more concrete. Its co-founder and CEO, David Gold, has spent his entire career breaking down walls between different systems and using communications and advocacy to drive policy change, particularly to advance health equity. With David’s support, I founded Bridge Beijing in 2016. I wanted to replicate GHS’ model in China and translate between institutions so that people could understand one another’s incentives and find a practical basis for cooperation.

Bridge Beijing received the 2019 China Social Impact Award

My involvement with CEPI began during COVID-19. The pandemic disrupted Bridge’s business, so I was looking for ways to adapt. At the same time, CEPI needed someone in China who understood both the global health community and the local landscape. So, in September 2021, I became a consultant for CEPI in China. I have helped CEPI build and manage relationships with Chinese stakeholders across the public, academic, and private sectors, while explaining CEPI’s mission in a way that makes sense locally and helping global colleagues understand the realities of working in China.

2. What lessons have you learned from the recent COVID pandemic and how different systems responded? 

My first lesson is humility. COVID was a once-in-a-century stress test for every government and every society. I am cautious about declaring which system “won” or “lost,” because there is no single objective scorecard, and I lived through the pandemic in China rather than experiencing other countries’ responses firsthand. Every system made trade-offs, and many of those trade-offs only became visible over time.

What is clear to me is that COVID exposed deep weaknesses in the multilateral health system. Earlier outbreaks, including H1N1, had already shown how quickly access to vaccines and other tools could become unequal. COVID magnified that problem dramatically. International institutions were expected to coordinate a global response, but governments were still protecting national interests, supply chains, and political legitimacy. The result was not only unequal access; it was also a historic loss of trust in institutions such as the World Health Organization. 

I remain strongly supportive of vaccines, public health, and international cooperation. But I am now more careful about how trust is built. People deserve transparency about uncertainty, room to ask questions, and confidence that institutions will update their advice when facts change.

3. What's a book, podcast, or experience that has shaped how you think about global policy & strategy?

One experience shaped me more than any single book. Apart from the Gates Foundation, Gavi was the client I worked with for the longest period. Gavi’s mission is to help ensure that children everywhere can receive life-saving vaccines. It had supported China in expanding hepatitis B vaccination in the country’s central and western regions. As China’s economy grew, the relationship needed to change: China was moving from being a recipient of support to becoming a contributor to global health.

Andre led a Chinese media delegation to Geneva in 2023, with Gavi as one of the stops

I was asked to help plan and execute the policy advocacy that supported that transition. In 2015, China became a donor to Gavi. The decisive choices were made at the highest political level, including by Premier Li Keqiang and Chancellor Angela Merkel. But those choices did not appear from nowhere. They rested on years of technical discussions, relationship building, carefully framed messages, and many pieces of working-level preparation. I helped draft a letter from Gavi’s leadership to Premier Li. Perhaps it contributed in some small way, although I would never claim that one letter caused a national decision.

That experience changed how I understand global policy. From the outside, policy often looks top-down: a senior leader announces a decision, and history records the announcement. In fact, the announcement is usually the visible tip of a much larger structure. Working-level people gather evidence, identify the right messenger, translate interests into language that decision-makers can use, and keep an idea alive until a political window opens.

So, to me, strategy is not predicting the exact moment when change will happen. It is preparing the environment so that when the moment comes, a good decision is possible. That is encouraging because it gives agency to people at every level. It also taught me to be modest about credit. Policy change is almost always collective and cumulative. The goal is not to prove that you personally moved history. The goal is to make a constructive outcome slightly more likely.

4. As Chair of the CINGS China Chapter, what motivated you to get involved with CINGS, and what excites you most about growing this community across borders? Any relationships or moments that stand out? 

Before I became President of the China Chapter, CINGS had already given me something very valuable: friendships. I met people such as Ivy, Muxi and Zihan, who are exceptionally thoughtful and generous with what they know. Meanwhile, some people pointed out that the CINGS community was very active in the US while members in China were paying the same dues but seeing very few activities. Those friendships and complaints motivated me to become more involved.

I am naturally result-oriented. My immediate priority has been to make the China Chapter real for China-based members. I was really glad to help make the partnership with A Better Community (ABC) happen, which gave our China-based members the opportunity to join donors from the ABC network in learning about climate change, visiting grassroots organizations to see their work firsthand, and ultimately supporting two nonprofits in Guangxi and Qinghai through our donations.

For me, the most exciting form of cross-border community is a high-trust, low-instrumentality community where people first try to understand and contribute, and only then ask what they can get from the network. In a difficult geopolitical environment, that kind of space is rare. It allows people who understand both China and the US to remain curious, disagree honestly, and still work together on philanthropy, social impact, and other practical issues.

5. What's your hot take on U.S.-China relations, or the future of engagement, that you think more people should be talking about — especially from a global health and pandemic preparedness lens?

The US-China relationship is unquestionably one of the most consequential bilateral relationships in the world, and I hope it can become more stable and constructive. My “hot take” is that AI could become the new ideology of strategic competition – not because AI is an ideology in itself, but because both countries may turn it into a total story about national destiny, economic success, and political legitimacy.

Over the past two years, I have read quite a few books about the Cold War. One lesson I took from them is that conflicts described mainly as ideological often had an economic structure underneath. The Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan, and its pressure on Eastern European countries not to participate, helped turn a political disagreement into a durable economic and strategic division. Ideology mattered, but choices about investment, recovery, trade, and security made the division concrete.

AI could play a similar narrative role today. It is a genuinely transformative technology, but it can also encourage a winner-takes-all mindset: whoever leads in AI owns the future, while the other side must be contained. That story can make every research collaboration, supply chain, investment, or talent exchange look like a security contest. Meanwhile, some of the underlying anxieties are economic, such as productivity, jobs, inequality, industrial competitiveness, and who benefits from the next wave of growth.

I think both governments are now often more rational than the public rhetoric suggests. They understand the costs of uncontrolled escalation and the depth of economic interdependence. My concern is that this rationality may gradually erode if AI becomes tied too closely to national pride and regime legitimacy. Once a technology becomes a test of who deserves to lead the world, compromise starts to look like weakness.

Andre recently brought together Beijing-based CINGS members for a discussion about trust in the age of AI.

6. At The Serica Initiative, we believe in the power of storytelling, empowering others, and convening communities. What does giving back mean to you, and how do you hope to create lasting impact through your work?

Giving back is personal for me because I saw it modeled in my family. My grandfather and my great-aunt both donated money to build schools in places where they had worked and built their lives when they were younger. It was a way of honoring the communities that had helped shape them. That example taught me that giving back is less about generosity as a single act and more about stewardship – recognizing that whatever we have achieved was made possible by other people and places.

Andre and his son, now 3 years old!

When I think about my years building Bridge, the result I am proudest of is that several former colleagues and interns still stay in touch with me. Some have told me that their time at Bridge helped them remain optimistic that the world can become better and that their own work can contribute to that. Entrepreneurship is exhausting, and I certainly made mistakes, but if people left the organization with more confidence, curiosity, and purpose, then something lasting was created.

There is also a meaning embedded in my Chinese name, 迪侪 (Dichai), which carries the idea of inspiring or guiding one’s peers. That was my parents’ hope for me, but over time I came to see it as a calling. I want my work to be useful not only to clients, but also to people of my generation and those who are younger. That is why I also believe in the power of storytelling, mentoring, and convening. 

A primary school building in Anhui province, funded by my great-aunt and named after the first character of my Chinese name

My definition of lasting impact is that people and institutions become more capable without depending on me. I may never see the full result, and that is fine. Giving back means helping create possibilities that other people can carry further than I can.

Thank you, Andre for your leadership and stewardship of the China CINGS.

To learn more about CINGS, please go to www.cings.org