[3] Shan authored Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America (2019), a memoir recounting his experience during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1969, when Mao Zedong closed all universities and dispatched youngsters to the countryside, Shan was sent to Inner Mongolia where he would spend 6 years in the Gobi Desert.

[7] Shan later moved to the United States as part of the first cohort of mainland Chinese students studying abroad after the Cultural Revolution.

[9] He served as an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for 6 years, where he founded the China Economic Review.

His memoir, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, was published by Wiley in January 2019 and became a national bestseller in February 2019.