Embrace of cultures still best lesson on understanding

When Ronald Sakolsky walked into a conference room in Beijing recently, he was immediately greeted by a former student he hadn't seen in 26 years.

The embrace that followed — captured by cameras and shared across social media — became yet another symbol of the enduring power of people-to-people connections between China and the United States.

Sakolsky, a retired history teacher from Pennsylvania, was in China for a 10-day visit from Aug 23 to Sept 1 at the invitation of the China Education Association for International Exchange.

His journey — from Beijing to the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Henan province — brought together the threads of a story that began in 1999, when he first came to Henan's Luoyang via a teacher exchange program that would ultimately transform hundreds of lives on both sides of the Pacific.

The US-China Teachers Exchange Program operated from 1996 to 2014. It was run jointly by the China Education Association for International Exchange and the American Council of Learned Societies, which was later replaced by the National Committee on US-China Relations.

During the 18 years, the program sent 332 Chinese teachers to schools across the US and brought 117 American teachers to Chinese classrooms.

Margot Landman, former program director and deputy vice president of the NCUSCR, said what began as "a crazy idea, unclear in the details" grew into a bridge of understanding that continues to bear fruit long after the formal exchanges ended.