An exhibition of artifacts related to Chinese students who have returned from overseas during the past 100 years or so is being held at the China National Museum.
This is the first time that China has held a national exhibition featuring overseas Chinese students' life and their contributions to the country's development during the past century. More than 700 pictures, writings, and relics from these students are collected at the show.
Mr. Wu Zongji, a 94-year-old scholar, was a student of China's well-known linguist Zhao Yuanren, one of the founders of the modern Chinese language, who studied in Europe and the United States during the early 1900s.
Wu Zongji, senior fellow of Institute of Linguistics, CASS, said: "Overseas conditions were quite tough for my teacher when he studied abroad. But he is a diligent and patriotic man. He returned to China and transformed his overseas knowledge into modern Chinese linguistics."
Professor Yan Siguang, son to the well-known overseas returned physicist, Yan Jici, expressed his confidence in the current influx of overseas Chinese students.
Yan Siguang said: "Western returned students made great contributions to our country in the past 100 years. And I believe in the years to come, students returned from the west will make more contributions."
Though China has experienced twists and turns during the past century, its contact with the outside world has played an important role in the nation's social progress. Organizers of the exhibition are calling for more exchanges between China and the West.
(CCTV.com March 21, 2003)
