One-month-long International Culture Festival of Zhejiang Gongshang University started on June 13, 2020 as previously scheduled. The festival began as scheduled despite that over 500 international students of the university were stranded overseas due to the travel limit imposed to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. At first some people worried that the festival would be canceled.

Just like the previous two festival, the third festival is open and international. Zhejiang Gongshang University gives top priority to international exchange programs, as testified by exchange and cooperation partnerships with over one hundred higher education institutions and research institutes all over the world. The university boasts one of the largest international student communities in the province: at the end of 2019, the university’s international student body had 2,213 students, including 1,275 undergraduates and 292 graduate students and doctoral candidates. The newly recruited students from Belt & Road countries in 2019 accounted for 65.9% of the total recruits in 2019.

In a video clip made for the festival, Chen Shoucan, president of Zhejiang Gongshang University, wrote an inscription featuring three Chinese concepts: harmony, solidarity, and fusion. He explains the concepts in a brief speech in the video: in Chinese culture, harmony represents a value system in which people live in harmony through diversity; people of different races and cultural backgrounds respect each other and pursue knowledge and public interests and benefits; solidarity means people share a common destiny; and fusion means a grand fusion of cultures and civilizations. The three concepts not only represent the university’s expectation of international students but also part of the mission statement of the university’s international programs.

International programs of Zhejiang Gongshang University are two-way streets: international students come to study in Hangzhou and Chinese students and teachers go overseas. In a program called Blue Sky, teachers of Zhejiang Gongshang University go overseas to work as visiting scholars and take part in short-term training courses; 500 students go abroad as exchange students; foreign teachers teach at schools of the university so that students can take part in exchange activities on the campus.

In the past two consecutive years, Zhejiang Gongshang University hosted a study program for young sinologists, an international program sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The program serves as a platform for sinologists from abroad to meet each other, to deepen their understanding of concepts and practices of China’s development, and to learn more about fine traditional culture of China.

The festival this year is made available through internet. Many international students, stranded at home, have had the opportunity to make videos to present cultural characteristics of the regions and countries where they are from. These video presentations on the festival’s platform are enabling international students to understand each other better and enabling their Chinese counterparts to understand exotic lifestyles, traditions and cultures better.  

Last year, international students of Zhejiang Gongshang University visited villages and businesses across Zhejiang to learn about business operations during the second festival. This year, students stay on the campus. An online business platform, set up for the festival, gives international students an opportunity to experience how to engage themselves in ecommerce, which is all the rage in China. They display products from their own countries and try to clinch business deals. This learning procedure is also part of the ecommerce in their curriculum.

The festival is also an opportunity for international students to express what they see and what they want to say about the Covid-19 pandemic which are now quite bad in some parts of the world. Short videos they recorded for the festival are screened to share their experience with the international student community on the campus.