 Good afternoon. It's really a great pleasure to be here. This is actually the first time for me to come to visit this beautiful country. Wherever I go, wherever I meet, are all new to me. But as I said previously that I have been longing to come to visit this country because the country itself is not new to me. When I was in the university, many familiar names such as William Butler Yitz, George Bernard Shaw, these names were familiar. When I was a student in this university, Beijing Foreign Studies University, that was more than 30 years ago, of course. And also Ireland is not new to many Chinese. Rev-a-Dance actually surprises the whole world, of course including China. We actually invited the Rev-a-Dance delegation to come to visit China and put on a performance during the Chinese Spring Festival, which is the show that is lively broadcasted to the whole country and also to the outside. So Ireland is the country that is familiar and to some extent not familiar. But I think it's wonderful to be here, especially to meet my old friend. Well, as I said to Britain that I want to keep my talk this afternoon as short as possible so that we could have more time for questions. And I think that should be the better way to make things clear. I did prepare a PBT, but I feel that it's more comfortable for me to just talk about it and share with you my thoughts. My talk is divided into four parts. The first one, overview of China's higher education. The second one, internationalization and its characteristics in China. And the third part is cooperation with EU and opportunities. The last one is about my university. Many of you have not been to my university yet so it's a good chance to bracket a little bit about my university taking this opportunity. Some scholars say that Chinese higher education actually can be traced back to eastern Zhou Dynasty, which is 700 to 200 BC, when Confucius taught to some of the students at that time. Of course it was the privilege of the elites only at that time. In the late 19th century, the outside forces played a large role in China, particularly in the development of higher education. And particularly during the wake of the first opium war, which was in 1840, some Chinese intellectuals discovered numerous western advances of the science and technology. So that actually opened a very good door for Chinese to understand how education developed outside the country. And the western university model actually played a very great impact on the higher education system in China. It was in 1895, people say that the first Chinese higher education institution was set up. It was a Beiyang University of Tianjin, which is the Tianjin University in China now. By the year 1949, when China was founded, there were only 200, a little bit more than 200, actually 205 universities in the whole of China. And that was the first phase of the higher education in China. And the second phase is from the year 1949 to the year 1976, which actually the Cultural Revolution took place during this time. During this time, China actually developed rapidly, both economically and educationally. But during this time, China copied very much and learned the model of the former Soviet Union. So everything was centralized, including the way of education, such as textbooks, syllabies, and the way of educating and cultivating people. So we very much copied the model of the former Soviet Union. But we did have quite a lot of development of setting up many universities and specialized colleges and institutions. The third phase is from 1976 to the year present, especially starting from 1977, the central government of China headed by Deng Xiaoping made the decision to restore the National Higher Education Entrance Exam, which in Chinese we call it Gaokao. Everybody wants to go to the universities has to pass the Gaokao exam. This actually is called the new phase of education in China. Personally, I myself took the exam and that was the first exam after the restoring of the system. I succeeded fortunately and was enrolled in the Beijing Foreign Studies University. I was lucky because I had the education at the attached school of Beijing Foreign Studies University and the education relatively speaking was very good. With the entrance examination restored, we also developed the degree such as bachelor degree, master's degree and PhD degree. So everything actually was put in the right track for the development of higher education since then. And also starting from 1978, China adopted the opening up policy to the outside world and a lot of exchanges and communications happened between China and outside which also provided a very good opportunity for students and scholars to go abroad to do the exchange programs. And also we received gradually more and more foreign students coming to study in China. And as we enter into the late 1980s, Chinese higher education has undergone a series of structural reforms. And these reforms gradually made a very good improvement from both from the qualitative perspective and also from the pedagogical perspective. The specific features of this reform are mainly in two areas. One is institutionalization, which means that in the past, many departments and ministries, they have their own universities such as China University for Agriculture used to belong to the Ministry of Agriculture. My university, Beijing Foreign Studies University used to belong to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That's why we have so many diplomats. And with this institutionalization, all the universities belong to the Ministry of Education. But of course, institutionally, they have the certain leadership and benefits from the departments and ministries they used to belong to. But another feature is the market economy-driven process. That is, everything was done in a planned economy. And then we gradually shifted and given more autonomy and decision-making power to the universities. And this is actually very well welcomed and received by the higher education institutions in China. I might give you some of the figures to show you how high education is looked like in present China today. According to the statistics, in 2015, which was last year, we have 2,845 universities with 35.59 million university students. Every year, there are about 9.4 million students taking the national entrance examination in China. And every year, there are about 7 million graduates leaving the university. This actually is a huge number according to the statistics that China now has the largest education system in the world. But the point is that China is big in education system. People say that it is not at all a strong nation of high education. This is one of the priorities that China is trying to develop to become a strong country of higher education in the next five-year plans. Secondly, I want to talk about the internationalization. Talking about internationalization, we mainly talk about three components. One is how do the universities look at internationalization? In China, we have different perspectives. Some universities think that internationalization mainly refers to the university to have cooperation with foreign universities or foreign institutions. But in fact, other people believe that internationalization in China itself is a way of attitude towards how you run the university. How you develop your strategies towards a better goal that you have already set up. Which actually means a lot to a university. My university, for instance, we pay great attention to the development of a relationship with foreign universities. But we do not rely on these. What we do is through the cooperation and exchanges, we want to upgrade the level of our education, of our teaching. And the most important thing is how we help our students to achieve a great vision for their future development. And that should be the most important part that we pay attention to. Secondly, people in terms of internationalization, people talk about student mobility, program mobility and institution mobility. At the moment in China, we have developed quite a lot of student mobility programs. I can show you some of the figures here. In 2015, China, there are 523,000 people going to study abroad. In which, well, government support students only takes very small proportion. Only takes about 42,000. That means more than 481,000 students are self-funded students. This is a huge number. We see this as from two different perspectives. Going to study abroad on the student part, it is a very, very good way of pursue the knowledge, pursue their future careers. But from other point of view, we see that we want to ask the question, why so many students going to study abroad? This could be a very serious question. One of the questions deals with the way of educating our own students in the country. Now, of course, there are several reasons for students to study abroad. Number one reason is China is well off. Chinese are rich. They can afford to send their kids to pursue the best education in the world. Second one is according to the traditional ideology. No matter how poor or how rich we are, one of the important idea in Chinese family, according to the tradition, that they want their kids to be the best once they create their careers. We in Chinese have a saying that every family wants their son to be the dragon and their daughter to be the phoenix. That which means that they want their kids to be in a better position than their parents. So the parents are willing to do everything to provide the education and conditions for their children. But one other thing that we want to talk about is that whether there should be a problem about the way of education of our own system. That should be the thing that we need to consider by ourselves. Of course, China is a still developing country and we have quite a lot of improvements in education, in developing our higher education. But still, what we need to do is to think about the way of education for quite a long time since China established. One of the examples that I can give you is that when I was a kid in the primary schools, teachers are always respected by the students. And the focus of the teaching itself actually was on the majority of the students. So when you go to a class or you go to a school, many of the activities are organized collectively. And students through the organization of the activities, they were brought the idea of collectivism. Which means that you respect the way of organization itself. At the same time, you constrain yourself, your individual way of trying to do things differently. So a foreign friend talked to me very straightforwardly that he said, why you Chinese students are always good at doing the examinations, answering all the questions. But in other words, we don't see many students in China at the both ends. The majority is in the middle, but we don't have too bad students and too good students. So this is the way of Chinese way of education, focusing on the majority, neglecting the individuality of the students. So the way of education itself actually is a very good point for us to consider. Especially at this time that Chinese government encourages greatly to be creative, to be innovative, particularly in the way of developing our own education models. We talk about the innovative cooperative programs before the meeting. And we actually agreed upon very much about how we should do our cooperative program in a creative way. And this actually is very much encouraged in China. And also I'm sure that as we go along, this may gain a lot of support from the China Scholarship Committee, which is the organization that provides scholarships for our Chinese students to come to study abroad. Therefore, the way the huge students to go to study abroad from China is actually considered from both sides. It's a kind of a good thing and also the point, the way that we need to consider very, very carefully. So this is the basic situation of students going to study abroad from China. But as we are at the time of making the next five-year plan, which is the 2016 to 2020, all universities in China have actually busy making the plans, particularly in November last year, when the Chinese State Council issued a master plan for developing higher education. This actually is a very good document for the universities to create and develop their own plans for their future. Which means in November 2015 the State Council issued a master plan for developing world-class universities and disciplines. This is in China what we call double world-class development for universities, namely world-class universities and world-class disciplines. Which means by the year of 2020 there will be, from the Chinese government point of view, some universities will get into the world class or top class of the world and some disciplines in China will get into the top class level. This actually is the document highlight China's effort to raise the overall quality and international competitiveness of its higher education system. Talking about the higher education and making the five-year plans in China, I think we need to look at what is the situation of the higher education, all the universities nowadays in China in terms of realizing their own internationalizations. Following the master plan and also in connection with the next five-year plan, there are several characteristics that can be summarized here for the Chinese universities. Number one is 95% of the universities in China have put forward clear development goals for the future internationalization development strategies including implementation plans. Many of them have even set up internationalization working committee to make sure that the job will be done. Second, most of the universities, they have been a great shift from quantitative development to the qualitative emphasis. Many universities have come to realize that the quality actually is the lifeline for their future development. Number three, being creative and being different have become a dominant understanding of all universities. Instead of following other universities or copy other universities model, many universities are trying to develop their own characteristics and specialties, which actually is the way that the Chinese government encourages very greatly. Number four, market-driven oriented development has become more and more outstanding for the universities. As we enter into a more competitive society, universities all pay great attention to the market development instead of doing what they were told in the past. And the last one, international cooperation and exchanges with foreign universities have become a must, almost a must. And all of them are looking for high quality partners for cooperation and exchanges. So these are the many characteristics of the universities in developing their own internationalization in China. And I think as we go along, there will be more and more universities to develop cooperative programs with foreign universities. And next, I think I want to talk about the cooperation between the cooperation with the EU and the opportunities. Some of you may be aware that China is very active in developing people-to-people high-level consultative mechanisms. So far we have developed China-U.S., people-to-people consultative mechanism. We have developed mechanisms with China-U.K., France, and EU, and Russia. And the last one is China-Indonesia. All these six mechanisms we would see is a very good way for China to develop comprehensive relationships with outside countries. Well, to look at all these six mechanisms, we can see very clearly that four of them, three of them actually, are in Europe. So half of the mechanism is located in Europe-China-U.K., China-France, and China-EU. Which shows that China pays great attention to the development of the relationship with EU, with European countries. China's government has encouraged greatly the universities to be strategic, to be supportive in the overall China strategic development with the outside world. And they encourage universities to be think-type oriented universities. Not only provide service of their own specialties, but also to get involved as closely as possible in the strategic development and relationship with outside. And talking about the university that provides the assistance to the cooperation with EU, and we can see that as now Bretton mentioned that Professor Wong is the director for UK British Study Center in my university, and he is also the director of Irish Study Center in my university, where we have two study centers that could make us to develop close relationship with UK and Ireland. And also we have in our university the Center for Eastern and Central European Studies, which is the center that approved by the Ministry of Education China to do the original studies for the benefit of the service of the government strategies. And also we have in our university 22 Confucius Institutes that was set up all around the world, and 17 of them are located in Europe. As I said that we also have quite a lot of programs and agreements with European countries. Some of them are newly signed in connection with the Erasmus Plus program, which is the program that supports the university to do cooperation with the country and universities outside the European area. And that I think is a great benefit, not only for our European university, but also the universities outside. And we are seeking to develop more connections with European universities with the support of the Erasmus Plus program. We also talk about how we should set up close relations with UK, with Ireland, and with some of the European countries by having a think tank oriented research programs. One of the ways is to carry out mutually interested studies that could benefit not only our staffs, but also our students. We also talked about that in every year in October in China there will be an annual conference of the China Education Association for International Exchanges, which is a quite big conference similar to NAFSA in the United States. During this annual conference there will be a very big education expo in China. This activity actually attracts great attention from the universities outside China. In every year there will be about 100 countries coming to join this annual conference. And I'm very happy to see that this year in October Ireland will be the country of honour of this conference. And we just talked about this during this morning's meeting with the Ministry of Education people that there will be a large delegation from Ireland headed by hopefully the new Minister of Education to China. And we are looking forward to seeing our friends from Ireland, from different universities of Ireland, and also from the Ministry of Education and skills of Ireland. This could be a very good opportunity for universities to mingle with each other and to talk about with each other, especially to explore the possibilities of developing future collaborations academically and educationally. The last one, the last point is about my university. Beijing Foreign Studies University has long enjoyed the good fame of cradle of diplomats for the country. Over the past 75 years we have produced more than 400 ambassadors, more than 1000 councillors for the country, serving the country in different diplomatic areas. I myself was an education councillor before I became the Vice President of the university. I worked in the Ministry of Education, but my two foreign posts provided me an opportunity to be a diplomat. My first foreign post was New Zealand. It was in early 1990s. And my second post was in the United States, in Houston, where I worked for four years. I really enjoyed the work as a diplomat because it provides you a different view and vision to look at the relationship and also to develop the exchanges and co-operations. The most important characteristic of my university is that this is a collegiate university that produces elites or talented students for the whole country. Most of the students, after graduation, they work in the diplomatic service in the mass media area and also in the national enterprises, big enterprises. The reason that the students can have the good and also high employment after they graduate is because of the level of education. We focus very much on our own teaching staff because we believe that once you want to have the high quality of students, you need to have the high quality of teachers in the first place. So we emphasize very much on the teachers' education in our university. And many of our teachers, they are very active in the exchange programs with foreign universities. They travel, they learn, and they do the research projects. Secondly, we emphasize very much on the overall development of our students. We emphasize that our students should be multilingual, which means they not only speak one or two languages, but they are able to communicate with people more than two languages. The reason that we do so is because we are aware that language is not only the tool for people to get communicating. Actually, it is a very good way of cognitive development for students and also a very important key for students to open a different culture, different history, and different value of philosophy. And once they believe that this is the way for their future and for the opening up of their visions, I think that will play a very, very important role for their future career. And secondly, we emphasize very strongly on the multifunctional education. We not only ask our students to be good at languages, but they should also be good at one or two subject areas. So we emphasize very strongly that students should be foreign language plus a subject area or professional. So in this way in our university, we not only provide 72 languages taught in the university, we also provide students with wider choices. We also have the School for International Relations and Diplomacy, where students can be diplomats. We also have the School for International Business. We have the School of Law. We also have the School for International Journalism and Communication. We also have the Computer Science Department. By way of doing so, we believe that we could provide a good educational environment for our students to be multifunctional after they graduate. And this university is one of the best universities in China in the foreign language teaching and research. Now the fashionable word is called cultural states. So this BFSU is very much focused on the foreign cultural studies and appreciation and also regional studies, as we talked about before this. The area studies is also one of the focuses of our university. I have been bragging quite a lot about my university. The most important thing I think is to invite all of you in the future when you have the chance to come to visit my university. In China we have the saying, seeing is believing. So for that, I thank you very much for your patience. And I would like to conclude my talk. And I want to thank you once again for your interest. And also, through this visit, we would like to see more activities going on between IIEA and my university in terms of European studies and think tank development of our both institutions. So once again, thank you very much.