By: Austin Long Posted on : April 12, 2012, 4:01 am in Yale US-China Forum Views: 472      Tweet

Last weekend, on April 7^th to the 8^th, I had the extraordinary chance to participate in the second annual US-China Forum at Yale. At the Forum, I had a chance to listen to and also personally meet many great Chinese students and scholars who have done great things, as well as many professors of US-China relations and of China’s evolving role on the world stage. As a student of Yale University, I had the chance to represent Yale University in the “Cross-Pacific Perceptions” debate against Harvard University, Peking University, and Tsinghua University. Our team debated once against the Peking team, and once against the Tsinghua team. As an American-born Chinese student, I’ve never really had the chance to interact with native Chinese students. For most of my life, most other Asian students that I’ve interacted with were also born in the United States, and were deeply entrenched within American culture. It was an exhilarating experience, to be able to connect with students from totally different cultures, with different values and different beliefs, and to be able to see just how similar we were to each other. I think that one of the keynote speakers, Paul Gewirtz, excellently summed it up when he expressed that no matter our differences, in the end, we are all people, no matter our backgrounds or our different cultures.  

Personally, the greatest part of the conference was being able to interact with these students from China, and to discuss and discover our similar interests and how we were different at the same time. The Forum gave me a chance to interact with the students from Peking and Tsinghua Universities during the conference and at the two dinners that they hosted, during which I learned a lot about Chinese culture, and thus indirectly what it should mean to me to be a Chinese-American. It became apparent to me through the keynote speeches that our differences are not so great that our nations should be forever opposed, but instead, that there is enough common interest at stake that it is easy to see a future where the US and China are great allies. And by talking to the other students, I can see that neither of us have antagonistic feelings towards one another. We are all united by the same wishes and aspirations for the future. Although some speakers expressed pessimism for the future, after meeting the students from both nations, and learning about our common interests, I believe that the future of US-China relations will be strong and prosperous.