[Singapore] Cecilia Lu Xinran, Peking University
Famous Chinese scholar Ku Hung-ming once said, “There is something unique in Chinese people that no other ethnic groups have – meekness. Meekness is not compliance, nor cowardice. Meekness represents a kind of strength, a kind of compassion and human wisdom.” I am deeply touched by this statement.
As a Singaporean Chinese, I have loved China since I was a child. My parents’ business in China has provided me opportunities to come to China during my holidays to travel and experience different cultures. After graduating from high school, I chose Peking University Health Science Center after careful consideration, and became a scholarship recipient from the Chinese government after beating other competitors.
I feel very grateful, and I am often asked what China means to me. I always answer proudly that China is my second home, which brings me warmth, happiness and feeling of security!
This home is so “big” that I can see the rice fields on my left and high-rising buildings on my right in the city. So big that I can feel new to the changing environment every time when I move around; So big that I have changed my dream of traveling around the world to traveling around China. What I admire about this big family is not only its vastness of space, but also its development in every aspect.
I have seen with my own eyes what the Chinese government had done to alleviate poverty and become the first developing country to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. From small-scale poverty alleviation in the past, to large-scale anti-poverty campaign, to today’s precise poverty alleviation, the poverty alleviation work has been effective.
Seeing the smiling faces in the news, I really felt a strong force of the nation. Although there are so many people in the vast China, every person is not forgotten and all people are running forward side by side.
This home is very “fast”. Thanks to the development of technology, living in China has been extremely convenient for me. This convenience has saved me a lot of time and made my life “faster.” Alipay has made it easy for us to leave the house with just a cell phone, saving the trouble to carry a wallet. Daily delivery and take-outs are so convenient that I can enjoy my life in the dormitory without leaving home. In terms of transportation, shared services are convenient for us.
A shared bike can be used on every road in the city, and I no longer have to worry about transportation problem. Even in remote mountain areas or poverty-stricken regions, people can take the train for 1 yuan – there are 81 such trains on the Chinese railroad. Though these trains are losing money due to the high cost of investment and maintenance, but they still travel through the mountain regions, carrying the smiling faces of many villagers.
I am also honored to witness the successful launch of the Shenzhou XII manned spacecraft with my own eyes, which represents the remarkable progress in the development of China’s aerospace industry and gives me great confidence in the nation.
This home is “strong”. The year of 2021 is a special one, in which people around the world have suffered from a sudden virus attack. But it is also a year that I was surprised by the “speed of China”. From the initial fear and panic about the unknown virus, to the rapid response and to the fast recovery, China has done many things that people thought it could not do.
One example is the construction of Huoshenshan Hospital. At the height of the epidemic, it only took China 10 days to build the hospital used for the quarantine of patients. At that time, I did not return to China to attend classes because of the epidemic. When I read about it on the news, I was surprised and impressed by it.
It was also a huge relief to me, who was concerned about the epidemic at the time. To tame the pandemic, China has administered more than 1.1 billion doses of vaccines so far, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s injections. It has also provided 400 million doses of vaccines to other countries. This makes me feel safer when I go back to school to continue my study.
As a Peking University student from Singapore, a country along the Belt and Road routes, I will bring the meekness of Chinese people back to my home country, share my study experiences in China with more people, let people from other countries have a deeper understanding of China and play an active role in promoting friendship between people of different countries.
I love China, which is my second home.
The story is from "My Beautiful Encounter with China" Essay Competition organized by the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchanges (CSCSE).
