A visit to promote understanding and co-op--Canadian Governor General on China trip (3)

I should tell you one of the great honors in my life is that I am an honorary fellow of Nanjing University. I was so touched that the honor was given to me. It was not an honor to me, it was an honor reflecting relationship of over 25 years that we have built between our two institutions, and we in turn honored president Wang of Nanjing University at our university, and that typified the fact that here are two universities on opposite ends of the globe that have found much common ground and each has advanced more substantially because of those personal relationships.

I am glad that in the last 40 years particularly in the education front we have seen very substantial changes and now there are about 84,000 Chinese studying in Canada, and close to 4,000 Canadian students in China, my three daughters were included at one point. And we hope that number will get up to 100,000 by 2015 and that would be one more example of how this relationship has blossomed over the years and I expect it to continue to do so. And I am fully confident that to achieve the target of the 100,000 two way flow of students is not the ceiling, but the floor, the number will be much higher.

There are a number of other fronts, for example we have a China Canada science and technology agreement for many years which has been helping on the innovation front and exchanging scholars and graduate students. At the same time, we expect to see more visitors from China. We are very pleased at the increase of tourists from China.

On impressions of China visits

Governor General says: I think our relationship is constantly being renewed in strength and going back over 40 years. My trips to China are about a dozen times now since 1981. When I first went, I was just struck by the rapid advances in China. And then, I came back again a few years later. I said: “O, my God! How much has changed in that period of time.” And I thought it cannot change this much again. But, when I came back, I was again struck by the advances made. I believe, this time I'll be very favorably impressed by the impressive advances that China is making.