182 SEM sophomores have successfully accomplished their health care research investigation along Yangtz River and came back to Beijing as the workshop for summer filed trip 2009 was held at Tsinghua SEM on July 18.

During the ten-day summer field trip, participants went to the rural areas of Anhui, Shanghai, Hunan, Hubei, Chongqing, Sichuan, and Qinghai and collected the first-handed materials concerning health care. They visited the health care departments of local governments, interviewed the rural doctors and patients and conducted surveys in the regions above.

“Here we’ve seen the drastic change of a village, I felt the great influence brought by China’s reform and opening policy to the country’s rural areas”, said the program participants in their blogs, “and we’ve got to know that, the economy and health care in Chinese rural areas are not two irrelevant things .”

The program is launched on the occasion of the reform of China's health care system. On April 6, Chinese government has issued a guideline on fixing the ailing health care system after over five months of debate and revision. It kicked off the long-anticipated reform to ensure health care service is more accessible and affordable to the country's 1.3 billion people.

(Students make presentation on their research findings)

Tsinghua SEM has always attached importance to students’ sense of social responsibility in its education. And the school has paid more attention to the development of Chinese rural areas in recent years. During the past three years, a total of 610 faculty members and students have participated in “the HSBC-Tsinghua Financial Development in China's Rural Areas Research Program.” The program concluded in June this year. Student collected a large amount of valuable data through their investigation and research on more than 5100 households, over 150 enterprises and more than 150 financial agencies; their trips have covered 16 provinces/regions, and 72 cities/counties respectively located in northwestern, northeastern and middle part of China. Their research reports have been collected in the book "HSBC-Tsinghua SEM undergraduate research program on financial issues in China's rural areas"(three volumns).