Benefits of accord feted 50 years on

Executives of US companies in China in finance, healthcare and higher education say that since the two countries signed the Shanghai Communique 50 years ago, bilateral collaboration has benefited both.

The executives also expressed hope that bilateral exchanges will continue for another 50 years. They made their comments at an event held partially on site in Shanghai and partially online with more than 900 attendants on Thursday.

It was organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, the National Committee on United States-China Relations and the Committee of 100 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Shanghai Communique when then US president Richard Nixon made his historic trip to China.

Sean Stein, senior adviser at Covington and Burling LLP, an international law firm in Washington, and who is a former US consul general in Shanghai, said the communique opened the door and paved the way for people-to-people exchanges.

"The real work of building the relationship was done by regular Americans, by regular Chinese, by businesses, by traders, by investors, by universities, by academia and students," he said as the discussion moderator.

Jeffrey Lehman, vice-chancellor of NYU (New York University) Shanghai, said collaboration in higher education not only helped people in both countries to understand each other better, but also helped to better prepare students to thrive in a more open world.

From student exchanges and joint degree programs between US and Chinese universities to joint universities such as Duke Kunshan University and NYU Shanghai, a lot has been achieved in higher education exchanges, Lehman said.

"I believe that the best education today is a cosmopolitan education. It requires people to become comfortable crossing borders and to be comfortable effectively working as members of multicultural and multinational teams. The best way to do that is to have joint programs where students are living together and studying together with people from the world."

The US has also benefited tremendously from this. Many Chinese students chose to stay in the US, becoming US citizens, leading figures in business, higher education, research and other sectors.

Lehman said that last year almost half of the articles published in US research journals included one co-author born in the US and one born in China.

Healthcare cooperation

Roberta Lipson, chief executive and founder of United Family Hospitals, or UFH, has spent 30 years in China's healthcare industry. She recalled how she brought the first ultrasound and MRI machines, among other medical equipment, to China and helped to modernize China's healthcare sector.

UFH, the first foreign invested and managed private healthcare group in China, has established private hospitals and clinics in cities including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin. The first hospital established in 1997 served predominantly expatriates. Now more than 70 percent of its patients are Chinese citizens.

The collaboration has grown in many areas since 1971, Lipson said, including the establishment of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and a joint effort to curb the spread of SARS. She also saw academic changes where hundreds of thousands of students traveled to the US and China and made great strides in medicine and healthcare. The US benefited from exporting equipment to China.

"Sadly, the public health collaboration and the academic exchanges have greatly suffered since 2017 when the US began reducing its funding for those projects as well as our own public health efforts," Lipson said, adding that the reduction led to problems for early response to COVID-19 because there were no people on the ground when it hit.

"We make great contributions to each other by way of our collaborations, and they need to resume," Lipson said.

Wuke Zhang in Oxford, Ohio, contributed to this story.