Upcoming dialogue with Professor Youmin Xi

Ever since the 21st century, the idea of building transnational university has been mushrooming in China. Unquetionably, one of the them is XJTLU  (https://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/)  in Suzhou (苏州), China. Recently, I have an interesting and convoluted relationship with this university.

I should say that even before I knew anything the university, I knew about the city Liverpool because that is where the Beatles came from. I knew about this Rock Group even back in the early 60’s when I was a high school student in Singapore.

First, XJTLU has multiple campuses. One of them, Suzhou, is my mother’s hometown (although she grew up in Shanghai). The other one in Taicang (太仓市), which is the hometown of Madame C S Wu (吳健雄), one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists in the 20th century. These geographical sites certainly bestowed me with special attractiveness about the university!

Second, let me explain why I have a long and intricate relationship with the University of Liverpool. Sometime in 2011, when I first became associated with the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan as its Senior Executive Vice President, my good friend and colleague, Professor Wang Weichung (王偉中), then the Vice President for Global Affairs, was in the process of initiating a joint-PhD program with the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. Once I learned about this program, I became deeply attracted to it for the following reasons:

(a) In my research area of nuclear structure physics, the University of Liverpool’s scientists were, and still are some of the leading scientists in this field. I think anyone remotely related to this area of physics knows about the discovery of Peter Twin and his team discovered the so-called “super-deformed nuclei”! Here there is another interesting fact that people may find intriguing. During 1972-74, I was a UK National Science Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester. During that time, I had to go often to one of UK’s national laboratories known as Daresbury Laboratory to use its supercomputer CRAY-XMP. The city Daresbury sits in the middle between Manchester and Liverpool. So, I must have taken literally hundreds of times this train to and from Warrington, the station that is closest to Daresbury, but never ended up in Liverpool.

During the negotiation process in Taiwan, a high-level delegation from the University of Liverpool came to visit us, and I became friends with the members. Eventually, I also had a lengthy visit to Liverpool (enclosed is my report of my visit). During their visit, the Pro Vice Chancellor of the university Stephen Holloway mentioned to me that because Liverpool wanted very much to establish a real presence in China, one of his duties was that every time he visited Asia, a “must stop” was Suzhou. He told me that he was deeply impressed by his counterpart in the negotiation. According to Stephen, this person never allowed a grand vision be modified and any stone in the negotiation unturned! While Stephen never mentioned the name of his counterpart, I learned much later it was of course Professor Xi Youmin.

Fast forward to my days in the University of Macau, I met for the first time Professor Xi who came to visit us. Like Stephen, I too was struck by how Professor Xi has the uncanny ability to discuss an issue first in the global sense, then followed by intricate details. Later, I met him again in Suzhou around 2016, and most recently a month ago. His intellectual understanding of higher education, philosophically and administratively, is truly overwhelming.

It was during my latest visit that I made the proposal to Professor Xi that we should have a global ZOOM dialogue about his views of transnational education, which to my great honor and pleasure, he accepted.