Reception for International Alumni Held
By Michael, Special to the Tsinghua News Center
On the night of Friday the 22nd, Tsinghua University organized a reception for all the international alumni that travelled from the world’s far and not-so-far corners to celebrate the centenary of their alma mater. Xie Weihe, the university’s vice-president, extended a warm welcome to the returning students, particularly thanking the earliest alumni for their role as pioneers in shaping the university. With international graduates attending who had known the university in the 1950’s, the reception became a tour down Tsinghua’s colorful history of the last sixty years.
The earliest graduate to attend the event was a Polish alumnus who had graduated in 1960. Impressing all present with his still-fluent command of Chinese, he told how honored he was to be present at his university’s centenary celebration, how happy he was to see his former fellow students again and how proud he felt for having been part of such a venerable institution.
Indeed, the wide-ranging changes Tsinghua has undergone through the decades were a central theme of the night. All alumni commented on the totally altered landscape of the campus, as newly-constructed buildings have made most of the university unrecognizable to those familiar with the school in earlier stages. Many commented also on other aspects of student life. Also academically the university has changed, as the university became once again a comprehensive university after having been an exclusively polytechnic engineering university since 1952.
By the 90’s, Tsinghua had become a magnet to students the world over, represented at the reception by alumni from both Koreas, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Benin, and Oman. Still, the stories of these students smack of a different era, as they tell of a Wudaokou without restaurants and a Tsinghua with few foreigners. A Pakistani alumnus from 1997 describes being one of three foreign students in classes with hundreds of students. The vast majority of foreign students in this era came from South Korea and Japan. The South Koreans have kept coming in ever larger numbers, but the Japanese have been ousted from second place by the Americans.
By now, Tsinghua University is a truly international university with, as vice-president Xie told those present, over 2000 international degree students. At the same time, the university can look back at 100 years of interaction with the world and many changes which have made the university ever stronger.
