Hopkins-Nanjing Center Commencement 2024
June 14, 2024
On June 14, 2024, more than 100 students graduated from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, in Nanjing, China. The commencement ceremony was a fitting conclusion to the HNC community’s first year of holding classes and events entirely in-person since 2019.
The commencement program highlighted many of the HNC’s unique characteristics, namely the jointly managed nature of the center and its unique academic structure. The mix of Chinese and English during the ceremony also demonstrated the unique bilingual expectations of community members of the HNC—the oldest educational joint venture in contemporary China, which opened in 1986 as a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University.
The ceremony began with co-directors Li Xiaorong and Adam Webb welcoming everyone and thanking the important guests, among them the friends and family members of the graduates, as well as HNC faculty and staff.
In line with the HNC’s tradition, the keynote speeches were delivered by two speakers, one American, and the other Chinese. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, delivered the first speech. Ambassador Burns, himself a SAIS alum from the Class of 1980, reminded the graduates that while the challenges they face are complex, their studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center helps maintain the ballast of the US-China relationship and “the bridge that we desperately need for the future.”
The Chinese speaker, Zhang Xinsheng, has an equally distinguished career. While he currently serves as chairman of the World Coastal Forum Coordination Group, he previously served as vice minister of education and as mayor of Suzhou in Jiangsu province, China.
HNC commencements also feature two student speakers--with an international student and a Chinese student delivering short remarks. MAIS graduate Jacob Davis and Chinese Certificate graduate Li Xin delivered congratulatory remarks to their classmates in their target languages, with Davis using Chinese and Li using English.
Before American Co-Director Adam Webb’s closing remarks, Nanjing University Vice Dean Zhou Jilin honored nine MAIS graduates with outstanding thesis awards.
Upon the event's conclusion, the graduates joined their classmates, family members, friends and faculty in further celebration of their accomplishments. They took photos, reminisced about the year's end, and came together for a banquet in the HNC cafeteria.
