Happy New Year of the Fire Monkey

The day was interspersed and crowned with music, dance, and magic performances, comic routines, prize draws and calligraphy demonstrations by Chinese students. “I am delighted with the turnout. Students have come from all over the Netherlands,” said ACSSNL chairperson Jiakun Gong.

Anka Mulder, Vice-President for Education & Operations at TU Delft, and Mr. Chen Xu, Chinese Ambassador to the Netherlands, welcomed the 700 mainly Chinese visitors. Mulder highlighted TU Delft’s collaboration with China at four joint research centres there and said the Chinese are now the second largest nationality on campus after the Dutch. She encouraged all international students to get to know China and celebrate good relations. The Chinese ambassador said that China will become more connected to the rest of the world and applauded the current high point of Sino-Dutch relations. There are more than a dozen memorandums of understanding in areas of education. The three next speakers touched on the themes of education, knowledge transfer and technology.

Sibrand Poppema, president of the University of Groningen, spoke of how his university is embracing internationalisation by presenting the latest branch campus at Yantai in Shandong province of north east China. Collaborating with the local China Agricultural University and the city of Yantai, it will offer Dutch study programmes and diplomas, but also aims to be research based, sustainable and entrepreneurial.

Eco-city masterplans
Martin de Jong, professor at TU Delft, enthusiastically described the way his career expanded in a China opening up to the world. After an exchange visit to the Harbin Institute of Technology, warm relations with locals led to collaborations elsewhere. He provided expertise to develop eco-city masterplans with the city of Shen-zhen and now has a position as adjunct professor of Fudan University, Shanghai, advising on cross-cultural management.

Ed Sander, founder of the ChinaTalk knowledge portal, told of how China is no longer just copying digital technologies. To the delight of the Chinese, he said innovative e-commerce and social media platforms such as WeChat and Xiami on smartphones are one or two years ahead of western counterparts. Functionalities allowing calling a taxi, making online payments and placing orders are commonplace for users in China.

In two parallel sessions speakers shared their stories about life and studies in the Netherlands in Chinese while English language speakers explained their experiences of China. Qing Wang, journalist at RNW Media, spoke of a huge information gap in Chinese perceptions of Europe. Many Chinese see it as a peaceful, living fairy tale, unaware of its diversity and history of conflict. She said a big cultural hurdle is the western social context of giving and receiving constructive criticism. The Chinese experience this as a bad mannered attack. In China you should always maintain proper behaviour and give compliments and positive feedback.