Conversations reveal power of people-to-people exchanges

"China must be a good place, because you love it so much."

Those words from Donna, a close friend in the United States, amazed me during a recent phone conversation from a hotel room in Seattle, Washington. Over the years we've known each other, I had never heard her gush with such affection for the country.

But there she was, speaking of China with such sweetness in her voice, because of what she had learned of it through talking to me and my husband Jun, who is from rural Zhejiang province.