April 21, 2006

Mr. President, it is my pleasure to extend a warm welcome to you and Mrs. Liu on behalf of our entire community. We are deeply honored that you have chosen to visit Yale.

Your country has an ancient tradition of reverence for education, and your actions affirm this tradition. During the past decade, you have made massive investments in your universities, strengthening the most excellent of those institutions while broadening access to higher education from less than 5% to more than 15% of your college-age population. Your nation’s focus on education has contributed substantially your historically unprecedented success in lifting more than 200 million of your citizens out of poverty in the past quarter century. We admire these achievements, and, like most Americans, we are hopeful that the development of your economy will be accompanied by continued expansion of the rule of law and strengthening the rights of individuals.

These past two summers, Yale has been privileged to host presidents and vice presidents from fourteen of your leading universities for an intensive ten-day seminar on the policies and practices of the world’s most respected institutions. Our conversations have acknowledged deep differences on important questions of values and national policy. But we also share values in common, chief among them the belief that only through education can one acquire the capacity to think creatively and independently, and thus contribute to scientific and material progress as well as to the humanistic and artistic expression that enriches society. We also agree on the power of personal encounter to deepen mutual understanding among those who start from different traditions, norms, and values. Our experience mirrors that of thousands of U.S. and Chinese scientists and scholars and tens of thousands of students whose interactions with one another can be a foundation for a lasting peace between our nations.

Yale is proud of its extensive connections with China. Scholars from our Faculty of Arts and Sciences and faculty from nearly all of our professional schools are currently engaged in more than 80 research and educational collaborations with Chinese counterparts. In addition to our seminar for university leaders we are currently involved in training programs for your environmental officials, mayors, senior executives of state owned enterprises, and senior governmental leaders. We are collaborating with Fudan and Peking Universities on major scientific research programs, and with your alma mater Tsinghua University on both cultural and environmental projects. Our China Law Center, directed by Professor Paul Gewirtz who helped to orchestrate the Rule of Law Initiative launched by President Jiang Zemin and President Bill Clinton, is deeply engaged with your courts, law schools, administrative agencies, and the National People’s Congress – helping to advance legal reform.

Our American students are eager to learn about China. They learn from study: enrollment in our first-year Chinese language courses increased by more than 50% this past year, and each time Professor Jonathan Spence offers his course in Modern Chinese History over 300 students enroll. And they learn from encounter: from getting to know the more than 600 Chinese students and scholars currently in residence here at Yale, who teach us even as they pursue their own studies.

We look forward to your address, Mr. President. By your presence today, you honor the long association between China and Yale, and you honor the place of the university in both Chinese and American society. We are deeply grateful.