Chinese Officials Participate in Vinson Institute Training
October 27, 2009
A 10-year partnership between the University of Georgia and China has created numerous opportunities for the university and the state.
A decade ago this year, UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government reached out to China by offering to partner with Chinese training facilities to provide comprehensive civil servant training to government officials.
Since then almost 900 Chinese officials have participated in government training in the U.S. as well as in Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangxi Province and Qinghai Province.
“For the Chinese and for us, it marks a pretty significant milestone of working with them—two very different public entities working together trying to train civil servants around how you manage a government,” said Steve Wrigley, director of the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. “It’s a unique program. I don’t know that there’s anything else like it in the country.”
UGA was one of the first universities to develop training programs for China after the country opened its doors in the 1980s. Today, as a result of the Vinson Institute’s venture into China, hundreds of students, faculty and staff members travel there for study abroad, student exchange programs and individual research projects. UGA officials signed partnership agreements last year with Tsinghua University in Beijing and Nanjing University in Nanjing. Those agreements allow cooperative research and academic exchanges between UGA and each of those Chinese institutions. Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue opened the Georgia Business Advisory Center in Beijing last year to help Georgia companies market themselves in China.
“We are—together—the lynchpin of the world economy,” said political science professor Bob Grafstein, whose study abroad program in China was the first at UGA four years ago. “As citizens and consumers, we’re going to be dealing with them for the foreseeable future.”
He has seen how students’ impressions of China have changed after arriving in the country for the first time.
“They expected to see tanks on the streets and people scurrying in fear—basically 1950s Moscow,” Grafstein said.
Law students traveling with a UGA study abroad program this summer learned a lesson on China’s political arena when they attended class at Tsinghua University in Beijing. That same day, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi also visited campus and spoke about climate change and environmental protection, the subject of a five-day tour to promote U.S.-China cooperation.
Climate change is one of many topics of contention between the U.S. and China. As two of the world’s largest economic players, they increasingly are engaged in issues ranging from terrorism to China’s trade surplus.
The Chinese students enrolled in Vinson Institute training also attend classes at home and in Athens. While in Georgia, they travel to several cities including Savannah, Dalton, Valdosta and Washington, D.C., meeting officials and enjoying the chance to interact with Americans who hold similar jobs.
On a visit to Georgia earlier this year, Chinese government officials from Nanchang toured historic Madison, met with Athens Mayor Heidi Davison at city hall, toured the Brunswick Heritage Center, and visited with U.S. Representative Jack Kingston in his Washington office.
“We learn a lot from them, both about public administration and about just culture and society,” Wrigley said. “It helps us carry out an outreach mission and a public service mission to our state by engaging public officials in the work there and then having them host the groups when they come here. They all enjoy it, and they learn a lot. They learn what UGA is up to, but it also exposes them to a part of the world they may not otherwise have ever been exposed to.”