“2010:  The Year of Decision”
Remarks by Jon Huntsman
U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
March 18, 2010

(As prepared for delivery.)

 

Ambassador Huntsman at Tsinghua University, Mar 18, 2010

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak to you today and celebrate – a little in advance – Tsinghua’s 100th anniversary.  The United States has a special connection with this university.  When Teddy Roosevelt was President, the U.S. government established a scholarship program for Chinese students with funds from the indemnity imposed on the Qing Dynasty for supporting the Boxer Rebellion.  The “American Indemnity College” (Meiguo Peikuan Xuexiao), founded in 1911 through this program, helped some of China’s top students prepare for study in the U.S.

Among the many prominent Chinese who benefited from this scholarship were the philosopher Hu Shih, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen Ning Yang, the mathematician Kai Lai Chung, and the astronautical engineer Qian Xuesen, who later founded China’s rocket program.  So successful was this program, in fact, that the Fulbright Scholarship – the premier American scholarship program today – was modeled after it.  And as you know, in 1928, the American Indemnity College became Tsinghua University.  We are pleased to be so intimately associated with your founding and evolution.  And we celebrate with you 100 years of friendship, and Tsinghua’s proud history as one of China’s top academic institutions. 

A long-time China hand once told me that any time is an interesting time to be in China.  But I would suggest to you that this year, the Year of the Tiger, is likely to be the most important in the 30-year history of U.S.-China diplomatic relations.  This is not because of recent tensions over arms sales to Taiwan or the President’s meeting with the Dalai Lama.  We’ve had and managed these differences for the past 30 years and at the same time have been able to develop a broad and productive relationship.  Rather what makes this year so pivotal is that it is one in which we must take action and make real progress on pressing global challenges like economic recovery, nuclear proliferation and climate change.  What we do together this year will help define how we address the challenges ahead of us this decade.

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