By Beate Engelen
For a week, Gong Sheng, Yue Yaomeng and I explored the daily life of the Yi people in Butuo, a mountainous, high-altitude county of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Region. Down in the lowlands of Liangshan at the shores of Lake Qionghai, the air and the scenery felt like Italy. But up here, in the [...]

By Gong Sheng
The land around here is barren. For many generations, the Yi people of Butuo County have been working hard to turn this patch of Southern Sichuan into a more beautiful place. The mountains are towering high. For several thousand years, the Yi have been toiling to cultivate this wasteland. However, poverty seems to [...]

A Girl from the Yi Minority Might Get a New Home – But Not a Family. By Beate Engelen
The photo of a big-eyed girl captures my attention when Ajia Rebu, a local official in charge of orphans in Butuo county, hands us some files as we are sitting in the back seat of the car. [...]

The fiercest snowstorms in fifty years wreaked havoc in Central and Southern China around the Lunar New Year Festival. Millions of people traveling home for the festival were stranded after travel routes were blocked. With 1.7 million evacuees the storm has made more people temporarily homeless than Hurricane Katrina, according to international reports.
Mainly due to [...]

Zhang Liwei, former associate general secretary and a long-time member of Amity’s Nanjing staff, has assumed a new position, following a call from Nanjing University. For many years, he served Amity and contributed a lot to the organization’s advancement with his professionalism, thoroughness, devotion and cordiality. He will be greatly missed. Fortunately, Zhang Liwei will [...]