Earlier this week our sister site thebeijinger ran a blog about the upcoming will.i.am concert on December 17th in Beijing to help raise awareness for the 100,000 Strong Initiative – a US State Department-led “effort designed to increase dramatically the number and diversify the composition of American students studying in China.”

The concert is newsworthy in more ways than one: considering there are currently ten times as many Chinese students in America, the initiative seems long overdue and certainly worthwhile. More Americans learning Chinese in China would hopefully foster a more constructive relationship between the two superpowers in the future, a situation in which the entire global community has a stake.Here in Beijing, Golden Bridges, a local NGO that focuses on social entrepreneurship and philanthropy between China and the US, has been working to develop Project Pengyou, a social networking platform that is one of the main components of the initiative (Disclosure: your correspondent sits on its Board of Advisers).

Led by Golden Bridges founder Holly Chang, the team has been developing a website and blog (featuring posts penned by thebeijinger’s new backpage columnist George Ding) over the past year and will be marking its official launch in early December at a private event that will be attended by US Ambassador to China Gary Locke.

In the meantime keep watching this space (and, of course, the site itself) for more news and developments on the project. If you are interested in getting in touch with the Project Pengyou team, click here.