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Dr. Gang Li was enthusiastically voted in by the GSC board on June 10th, 2023 after an earlier interview with a sub-committee of the board. He said, quoting Nietzsche, that he has a strong conviction about his why for joining the board. He now needs to settle into the how of his participation.
Dr. Li was an only child born and raised in the People’s Republic of China. There the social world was a clash of class interests which the government aimed to ameliorate through careful planning. Yet something seemed to be missing from this life.
An American teacher introduced the young Gang Li to the colourful and rich spiritual world of the Christian faith. Something came alive in him that he just could not let go, and over the next decade his own faith would grow.
He received his BA in English at Yantai University, China in 2002. Then he worked as an English teacher at Beijing New Oriental School for five years. From 2007 to 2008, Gang attended Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, completing an MSc in Education with distinction as a Chevening Scholar. There in Wales he attended a Presbyterian church. “That was one of the best years of my life,” recounts Li. “It was also a most wonderful experience of congregational life. The singing was just beautiful.”
Even today, Dr. Li experiences a deep sense of joy in Sunday worship. “Sometimes I feel so much joy in church,” he explains, “I just want to shout ‘Amen!’”
His next step in education was to do his PhD in education, and he applied to the program at UBC because of a certain church in the area that he thought would be nourishing for him. He knew no one in the region, but he took the leap to Canada. After much intense study and writing, and ten years of dissertation work, in 2020 he received his PhD in Educational Studies from UBC.
His PhD research was on the democratic sensibilities of Chinese international students who return home to China after being overseas. There are one million Chinese international students around the world and 70% are in English-speaking countries. How does their return affect China? What are their political and democratic sensibilities after spending years outside of China, and how does this influence the culture and future of China?
Dr. Li is not the typical education professor, as his expertise is not in teacher training. His fields of interest include leadership, governance, integration of faith and learning, and international higher education. He is particularly interested in reimagining leadership studies from the perspective of a Christian worldview particularly by reconceptualizing the notion and practices of leadership within the biblical metanarrative.
At the moment, Dr. Li is collaborating with other scholars in the China Innovative Urban-rural Governance Research Network to advance conceptual bases of community leadership in rural China through case study research.