So reads the opening line of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center's vision statement. Considering the professional advances of the center's alumni, who now number more than 1,000, a future in which leaders in the U.S.-China relationship find that their counterparts are fellow alumni is close at hand. Fourteen years after the Hopkins-Nanjing Center opened its doors, it continues to demonstrate its unique contribution in preparing professionals who are able to flow into and out of cultures, and across cultural barriers that typically divide qualities increasingly important in a globalized world. At the same time, it enhances their academic understanding of each other's history, political and economic conditions, and social realities. The result is a qualitative difference in the graduates professional and personal development.
Crises reveal essence.
Shortly after the bombing, most U.S.-related institutions in China were encircled by angry Chinese. At the Hopkins-Nanjing Center,Chinese and U.S. students gathered together in a classroom to try to make sense of the nonsensical. Through many tears, U.S. Co-Director Elizabeth Knup remembers, students acknowledged each others strongly held beliefs, deep emotions and disagreements and moved toward a mutual understanding. That experience was more than symbolic it will shape that class of alumni for a lifetime. As exemplified by the Belgrade bombing that year, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is embedded in the dynamic context of its present.