Subnational ties forge lasting bonds

"We have been very proud to host students from Fuzhou at Lincoln High School every summer and introduce them to Tacoma," said Tacoma City Council Member Jamika Scott. She said her younger cousin was one of those students and the experience helped her discover a lifelong passion for the world.

"I have no doubt these invaluable firsthand experiences are life-changing. I think it's going to be particularly important to expand our exchange programs in the coming years."

A former teacher and artist, Scott envisions deepening the relationship through creative fields. "Students in Tacoma are especially engaged in the arts, including glassblowing, painting, photography, filmmaking, dance and so much more. Sharing these creative passions with their Chinese counterparts and learning more about the creative work in China will enrich the lives of our young people," she said.

"When youth share their perspectives through art, I believe they can deepen their understanding of each other and find ways to imagine a bright future working together in collaboration," she added.

The same spirit of exchange extends beyond sports and language. In medicine, one of the oldest China-US educational partnerships continues to bring students, doctors and researchers together more than a century after it began.

China's earliest partnerships with a foreign medical school began in 1905, when a Yale-trained physician from the US named Edward Hume arrived in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and established a clinic that would grow into Xiangya Hospital.

The name Xiangya means Hunan and Yale. More than 120 years later, this heritage has turned Hunan into a long-standing hub for China-US medical education cooperation, and that relationship is still active today through student exchanges, joint training and research partnerships, said Mai Miao, vice-president of the Hunan People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.

Xiangya School of Medicine, now part of Central South University, continues to collaborate with US institutions on training and research. The school's US origins make Xiangya a natural bridge between Hunan and US medical institutions. Building on that bridge, Mai said, the province aims to become a base where Chinese and US medical professionals exchange ideas and collaborate.

In April, the Changsha leg of the 2026 China-US Youth Health Dialogue convened young medical professionals from both countries at Xiangya School of Medicine. Vladimir Ljubimov, a neurosurgery faculty member at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, shared his research at the conference and later documented the experience on social media.

The photos show him posing for group photos with Chinese colleagues, visiting the thousand-year-old Yuelu Academy, a traditional pharmacy and the neurosurgery department of Xiangya School of Medicine. He called it "an unbelievable experience" and wrote in the post, "I got to see and learn so much about China's healthcare and met world-class young professionals from China and the US, making great friends along the way!"

University of Michigan Medical School student Max Wagner, one of seven students from the university who attended the China-US Youth Health Dialogue last year, encouraged his fellow students to apply.

"These experiences broaden our understanding of medicine and the diverse ways it can be delivered and perceived by patients," he said in a news release on the school's website. "We embraced so many opportunities to step outside our US-based clinical lens to see patient care from a new cultural perspective."