On October 31, 2015, Professor Peter Nolan, Chairman of the Development Studies Center in the University of Cambridge visited Peking University (PKU). He was accompanied by Zhang Jin, Lecturer in the Judge Business School and Deputy Director of the China Executive Leadership Program (CELP), and Zhang Zheng, head of CELP’s Beijing Office.
Li Yansong, Vice President of PKU, extended a warm welcome to the guests from Cambridge. Also attending the talks were Deng Ya, Assistant President and Secretary General of the PKU Education Foundation, Li Chenjian, Vice Provost and Vice Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Zhang Xudong, Vice Dean of the Yuanpei College and Director of the International Center for Critical Theory, Zheng Ruqing, Deputy Director of the Office of International Relations, and Li Yun, Office of International Relations.
The meeting was mainly about deeper cooperation between the University of Cambridge and PKU. At the beginning, Mr. Nolan mentioned some concepts in a book called How China Sees the West, which he is currently writing. He proposed that there were four periods in history showing the relationship between Eastern and Western culture: beginning, convergence, first divergence, and second divergence. Meanwhile, the main reason for the divergences is that the East and the West possess different language systems. “If we want to understand each other, we should better understand how we look at each other,” Mr. Nolan said, “but neither of us really has made much efforts to achieve that.”
In response to Mr. Nolan’s hopes for cultural understanding and communication, Mr. Li and Mr. Zhang put forward that the prospective University of Cambridge center at PKU would support several important components, including student exchanges, joint research, and visiting scholars. Mr. Li also stated that outstanding students today show a strong sense of awareness about the bigger world around them, and because of ideological conflicts and different historical understandings between different peoples, so we need to have sincere and in-depth conversations to bridge the gaps between peoples.
After discussing cooperation for some time, both sides reached an agreement that the international cooperation could start with a number of elite students to bridge the gap between the two sides.
Starting with student exchange programs, a higher level of cooperation could be attained by prompting scholars from Britain and China to cooperate more closely and effectively, which would be warmly welcomed by PKU.
At the end of the meeting, Mr. Li asked about concrete tasks and plans of the prospective center and also presented a souvenir to Mr. Nolan.
Written by: Chen Meizhi
Edited by: Wei Yuchen
