-- The speech of President Lin in his educational visiting tour in the US in 2012
It’s my great pleasure to have such an opportunity to have this seminar to communicate with leaders and teachers from Education Bureau of Monk County and Oakland University.
First of all, I'd like to give an introduction of Weiming Education. In the educational field in China, Weiming is a relatively young Group with a history of 12 years. It is the largest private educational group in China, whose educational instutions ranging from the kindergarten to high school with about 25000 students and faculties. Currently our business has covered some of the top 20 cities in China; those cities have the population of over 10 million, including Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Suzhou, and Guiyang. We are planning to open up new kindergartens and schools, and expanding our business in 15 out of top 20 cities in China. In the 12 years’ development history, we not only have developed educational business, which we refer to as course design, faculty training and teaching inspection, but also we have expertise and professional teams that can design school buildings, school’s environment, equip the facilities, design and make student’s uniforms and provide logistics service. I believe 12 years' development has equipped Weiming’s work with a comprehensive system for schools’ operation. That is the brief introduction of Weiming Group.
The second point I’d like to introduce to you is why Weiming Education Group can have such great development achievement. The main reason is the change in economic environment in China. We pay much attention on the changes in economy in the past thirty years, but after China has established the economic foundation, students and parents have new requirements for education, which pose a significant challenge on the education field in China. There are two key requirements for the education sector; one is the higher efficiency in operational system. As I mentioned before, before the establishment of Weiming, almost 100% schools in China were public schools. Weiming is a private education group. In its 12 years’ development, I consider private education as a advantageous system, we firmly believe it is the trend in the future educational development in China, which also gain unanimous recognition of government and parents. Besides system revolution, our children not only should have good scores, decent jobs, but also they should learn how to live, study and integrate in this world, which require us to provide more diverse education to our children. In order to let our children know better about the world, we come to the US.
The third question is how we cooperate with the US colleagues. Just as I mentioned before, we are faced with a very tough and complicated situation. We should increase our operational efficiency in education and change the service pattern in education by having long-term cooperation with our colleagues from the US. Because it takes a lot of time to integrate Chinese and American education, from the curriculum to construction of teachers. It requires a exceptionally good prerequisite and foundation, which is efficient and long-term stable cooperation. I have just stated our goal. Our goal and the US’s goal are consistent in the future development of children. As I mentioned before, we are a private education group, if we have set our goals, everyone present will persist in realizing it. So during the cooperation, you will have stable partners. This precondition is very important to us. Another important point is that we are a private school, so we have very strong economic foundation, which brings long and stable income to our partners. We define the business part in our school’s operation in this way: we consider commercial relations as a highly efficient measure. It should serve for the purpose of education. We neither reject it nor depend on it.
As to the specific cooperation matters, which is the third question I just raised, that is how we can cooperate. In fact, it has two aspects. One aspect is that we hope schools in the US can participate in the operation in China. We had talked a lot about strengthening the language ability of students. Based on that, we hope to expand it to the design of schools' environment, overall course arrangements, operational management of schools, and faculty training. We hope the schools in the US can get involved in all those areas. We want to create a familiar environment in schools for students when they are having Chinese and American education. This is a goal we want to achieve most in the educational revolution. I want to add something to Weiming’s introduction. We have specific target customers in China, which is the middle class. As we all know, in the past, China does not have middle class, but now in the economic aspect, China has the middle class, but they are not real middle class. We think a mature middle class should not only have good labor skills, decent payment, but also should have deep understanding about arts and culture, deep recognition to the nation and peoples. So Weiming’s responsibility is to foster the middle class in China. In my opinion, if China wants to achieve stable development, it should realize this goal in thirty or fifty years. We are convinced that the future leaders and elites in China come from the middle class.
This is linked to the other task in our cooperation. Let me summarize our first task, which is involving more American colleagues in education field to cooperate in our school’s operation. The other task is to build a smooth transition for Chinese students to study in the US, with the help of our American colleagues. Because most of our students are from the middle class, so a majority of them are planning to study in western countries. We want to help them develop well in the US, not limited to having good scores, but also attending a satisfactory university, having a decent job and good life. This is the purpose of education as well as our responsibility. We want to achieve our goal together by thoroughly communicating with American educational sector.
This is all I want to share with you. Thank you!