Experts in education, art and music said Thursday that engagement with China deepens outside understanding of the country and encourages more people from abroad to travel there, meet its people and experience its culture.
A conversation built around listening
The remarks came at a Vision China event held that day at the global headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers in central London. Themed Listen to Each Other, Open New Horizons, the event aimed to inspire its audience to build a cultural bridge across differences with a more inclusive mindset. It marked the first time Vision China had been held in London, following a recent phone call between President Xi Jinping and the British prime minister in which the two sides agreed on the importance of communication and exchange to developing bilateral relations. Xi called on China and the UK to seek common ground while setting aside differences and further strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation, while the British side said it was ready to advance cooperation across all fields and deepen people-to-people exchanges.
Working to close a perception gap
Qu Yingpu, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily, which hosted the event, said via video link that by embracing this shared vision, China and the UK could also encourage the wider international community to bridge differences and work together. He said that even as technology has made communication faster, closer exchanges remain necessary to break down the preconceptions that often shape how people see one another, calling on people to see, meet and listen to one another so as to build understanding through empathy, sustain friendly relations, open new ground for international cooperation and development, and contribute more to building a community with a shared future for humanity. Zhao Fei, charge d'affaires ad interim at the Chinese embassy in the UK, also addressed the event.
Ondrej Dostal, a member of the European Parliament from Czechia, said he has traveled to China several times and has seen firsthand how the country has become one of the world's most significant centers of innovation and production, something he said goes well beyond technological strength. He said that for many people in the West, perceptions have simply failed to keep pace with reality, leaving an enormous gap between the real China and the China of popular imagination, a gap he linked to what he described as an intentional smearing of China in parts of Western political discourse and media aimed at discouraging engagement with the country and containing its rise. He said a great deal of work remains to explain China's vision to Europe and the wider world, arguing that Europe and China face too many shared challenges to let misunderstanding define their relationship. Only by seeing China as it truly is, he said, can Europe build a China policy grounded in reality rather than projection, move past outdated stereotypes and manufactured threat narratives, and ultimately move beyond rivalry toward partnership, and, he hoped, friendship.
From Dunhuang scrolls to piano duets
For Frances Wood, a well known British Sinologist, mutual learning has been central rather than incidental to her 30 years at the British Library, work that has involved conserving and digitizing about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments of ancient scrolls from Dunhuang, in Gansu province in Northwest China, dating from the third to the tenth century. She recalled how British and Chinese conservators worked side by side to repair the fragments, forming friendships and a family like bond along the way, and said that after decades of work, more than 7,000 new manuscripts had been recovered from what had been debris, alongside a series of published academic books.
Chen Junyan, who took second prize at the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition, said listening is not a metaphor for her but simply what she does, and that her music education in both Shanghai and London taught her that listening broadens one's horizons. She said one of the main reasons she became a pianist was the chance to play chamber music with instrumentalists from other countries, describing a process of listening, responding and changing together on stage that produces something none of the musicians could have created alone, and said meaningful cultural exchange works the same way, requiring enough curiosity to listen and enough confidence to let what one hears bring about change.
China through a lens and in numbers
Mike Longhurst, a fellow of the UK's Royal Photographic Society, said he has viewed China through several different lenses across his visits to Chinese cities, as a photographer, a businessman, a tourist and a sustainability consultant, and has photographed the Pudong skyline from the Bund in Shanghai, the Great Wall near Beijing, the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, giant pandas in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and the karst landscapes around Guilin, in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. He said what he loved most was seeing the people, arguing that it is people and their values that determine how everything is created, maintained and presented, and that he sensed a sense of togetherness in China that he finds missing in many other cultures. He said China is so vast that anything he has seen represents only a small part of it, and that he hopes to return and see more.
Since China extended visa free entry to travelers from a number of European countries, including ordinary British passport holders, this February, more visitors from the UK and Europe have been traveling to see the country for themselves, even as China remains one of the most important sources of visa applicants to the UK. The growth in people to people exchange is even more pronounced in education, with about 100,000 Chinese students traveling to the UK each year for higher studies. Richard Trainor, provost of the Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford, said the 44 Chinese Rhodes scholars to date have become central to a scholarly community spanning continents and disciplines, and that they demonstrate how empathy, collaboration and courage are key qualities for 21st century leadership. Michael Spence, president and provost of University College London, pointed to the contributions of UCL's 15,000 Chinese students and 30,000 Chinese alumni, as well as the university's role in promoting Chinese language teaching in public schools across England, saying that while shared language is only one of many routes to building trust, it most clearly illustrates the values that trust and cooperation require, recalling his own studies of Chinese. Asked about daunting global challenges from climate change to the governance of artificial intelligence, Spence said he saw no reason for pessimism, since what British and Chinese students, scholars and researchers have already achieved through collaboration stands as proof of what is possible.
The London edition of Vision China also included a dialogue session in which six young panelists from China, the UK and France exchanged views on economic and trade cooperation, people to people exchanges and cultural interaction. Through candid conversation, they shared experiences and perspectives across borders, building greater understanding and common ground while underscoring the role young people play in shaping the future of China-UK and China-Europe relations.
