This weekend, Cornell students here in Ithaca enjoyed the few remaining days of sunny weather and prepared for pre-Thanksgiving crunch time. On the other side of the world, President David Skorton was in China delivering a speech for a panel session titled, “Higher Education Under the Financial Crisis: Strategies and Development,” at the 2009 Beijing Forum which aims to promote the study of the humanities and social sciences around the world. Prof. Peter Katzenstein, international studies, delivered a keynote address at the forum.

In addition to the forum, Skorton and Alice Pell, vice provost for international relations, had another reason for being in Beijing: to return the last batch of a valuable fungi collection compiled by Shu Chun Teng who studied at Cornell in the 1920s. To protect his specimens during the Japanese invasion of China, Shu Chun Teng smuggled his collection out by ox-cart and shipped parts of it to Cornell for safekeeping in 1937. The saga of the “fungi of China” ended with their return to the Chinese Academy of Sciences over 70 years later. All in all, a busy weekend for Cornell in China.

“The [Cornell-China] relationship has strengthened and grown exponentially, at least in my experience,” commented Laurie Damiani, director of international initiatives. Damiani spent 24 years in the East Asia program prior to her current post. Since becoming director of international initiatives, she remarked that her broader perspective gave her new insight into the China-related initiatives across the University. “It was really an eye opener to see how vast the interactions with China really are,” she said.

The roots of the University’s deepening relationship with China go back as early as the 1920s with the the Cornell-Nanjing Crop Improvement Program. A team of Cornell plant breeders developed new strains of rice, wheat, cotton and other crops to improve agriculture in northern China, and the team trained Chinese workers in techniques for crop improvement.

Currently, ties between Cornell and China are at an all time high.

“China is a region of great importance both to Cornell as well as our peer institutions. There are numerous faculty across the University who are collaborating with counterparts in China in numerous fields as well as several thousand Cornell students learning about China’s society/culture and learning to speak Mandarin,” Damiani said.

In April 2007, the highest-ranking Chinese diplomat in the United States, Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, visited campus to deliver a lecture and to meet with Skorton and faculty members. In April 2009, State Councilor Liu Yandong, one of the highest ranking female government officials in China, came to finalize the fungi arrangement and discuss further collaboration. Last week, delegates from Tsinghua University arrived at Cornell to sign an agreement regarding their purchase of 95,000 duplicate titles from Cornell’s libraries as well as to discuss student and faculty research exchange.

In the upcoming weeks, the President of Tianjin University will visit Cornell to discuss collaboration with the College of Engineering, and a delegation from Renmin University will come to learn about Cornell’s administration.

“They’re coming to Cornell to see how the University operates. They want to come and learn Cornell’s best practices and how we do business to better hone their practices,” Damiani said about the Renmin delegates. “Cornell has a lot to offer China, and China has been aware of that for over a century.”

Damiani also noted the reciprocal interest of Cornell in China. As China becomes a more powerful country on an international stage, it has developed more research opportunities in topics ranging from the economy to climate change. “Cornell has many faculty and students working in these areas, and the opportunities for them to contribute are enormous,” Damiani said.

Damiani remarked that despite the financial crisis the Cornell and China relationship will remain strong. “We will probably have to be more selective about what we do, but there is still going to be as much interest as ever,” she said.

In addition to forging a relationship through collaborative projects and research, the University has a long history of student exchange with China. Prominent alumni include the first Chinese student to graduate from Cornell, Alfred Sao-ke Sze 1901 who became China’s ambassador to the United States, and Hu Shih 1914, who brought his new ideas from western schooling back to China and became a prominent figure in educational and social reform. Preliminary figures for this fall indicate that there are currently 623 Chinese students enrolled at Cornell, the largest international student population.

Zhi Pan Yang, a visiting scholar from Beijing commented, “Cornell is very famous in China. There are many Chinese students who want to come here.”

Cornell supports student interest in China with language programs, the East Asia Program, which includes the study of contemporary and historical China, and the China Asia-Pacific Studies Program. The CAPS program is a new major launched in 2005 that emphasizes Chinese language, history, culture, politics and economy, and features a study abroad in both Washington DC and Beijing. “There is no equivalent in American higher education,” said Prof. Chen Jian, history, about the CAPS program.

Chen Jian stressed the need to continue to strengthen the Cornell-China relationship with a “forward-looking policy,” especially if Cornell hoped to stay in line with its other Ivy League peers. He noted a greater number of opportunities in China — quickly recovering from the financial crisis — then before.