This post was written by Hal Bernton

In Guangxi Province in southern China, a wealthy businessman who sells motorcycles has organized 20 volunteers who look after children and help clean the homes of the elderly.

It's a good program, said Luo Rixin, vice president of the Guangxi Regional Youth Federation. But it needs to get bigger and serve more people.

GREG BAKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nike says consumers who buy its products want the corporation to shoulder social responsibility.

Luo is one 18 young Chinese leaders who visited to Oregon recently for an unusual weeklong seminar to find out more about how activists in America and elsewhere innovate for social change.

A new generation of Chinese leaders is looking for creative approaches to address poverty, pollution and other problems unleashed by the fierce juggernaut of growth.

There has been a lot of buzz about social entrepreneurs. But the concept sometimes gets lost in translation.

"This [the United States] is so different from China, which is government taking the lead," said Dong Xia, a deputy secretary general of the All China Youth Federation. Two years ago the group reached out to Portland-based Mercy Corps to organize the seminar.

Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps senior vice president, noted that America has lessons to learn from China as well. "You have taken more people out of poverty than any other country in history..." he said.

The training was originally scheduled for May of last year, then postponed by the earthquake that ravaged Sichuan Province. The tragedy unleashed a huge wave of volunteers in China as tens of thousands of people donated time and labor to the recovery. Yet the government keeps many civil society groups under strict control.

The seminar explored partnerships between non-profits and governments. The Chinese learned how U.S. organizations sometimes hire lobbyists to gain funding from Congress. Zhou Mi, vice president of the Chongqing Municipal Youth Federation, wanted to know how much that lobbyist costs.

At the end of a day, there was also time set aside for a more familiar activity: shopping. The group received a special invite to the Nike employee store.

Read a longer report about the Chinese efforts to understand social entrepreneurship, with photos from the seminar, here.