As demand increases for U.S. products in China, government leaders in the Capital Region and across the country are making a push to foster connections between small, local businesses and the world’s fastest growing consumer market.

Much of the discussion about how to improve education has been reduced in recent years by a venomous national debate over whether teachers should be judged by the standardized test scores of their students.

“Good morning, Sacramento! It’s a perfect day for a pig roast. Come out and join us,” hog farmer Perrin Clark tweeted on a long-awaited day in May.

On a spring day in 2011, 60-year-old Russell Edgar checked himself into a 14-day Newstart residential program at the Weimar Center. In the Sierra Nevada foothills above Sacramento, the center promised to teach people with diabetes, obesity and cancer how to reverse their health problems through natural healing methods.

At a conference in China in November 2010, Harris Lewin and Richard Michelmore approached Jian Wang, the president of global genetics company BGI, with an informal question: Could they interest the world’s largest genomics research institute in building a lab at UC Davis?