US diplomat champions study abroad

US ambassador to China Max Baucus shakes hands with a Chinese student who just received his student visa to the US.

Last Friday, Max Baucus, the US ambassador to China, came to Shanghai to hand out visas to Chinese students from the region covered by the US Consulate in Shanghai. Six Students who will go to US to study this August received their visas and had a conversation with the ambassador.

The US Consulate in Shanghai is committed to providing world-class visa services to the people of Shanghai and Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. They do their best to facilitate person-to-person exchanges, such as for business, education, tourism and family visits.

In 2013, the consulate processed more than 415,000 visas. Non-immigrant visas processed in China represented more than 14 percent of applications worldwide. Among them, mission China issued more than 246,000 student and exchange visitor visas to Chinese applicants in 2013, a 13.7 percent increase over the previous year.

John M. Grondelski is the visa unit chief of the US Consulate General Shanghai. "Currently, Chinese students are by far the largest group in US," he told the Global Times. "Chinese dominance in that number is clearly a strong presence in the American market. We welcome that."

One applicant, Xiao Yiting, just graduated from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics this month. She is going to the Georgia Institute of Technology to study information analysis. It will be her first time going to the US. She said she feels excited and looks forward to living in the country on the other side of the Pacific. "The US has the best education system in the world. I want to experience it myself," she told the Global Times.

Chen Zhiqian is a sophomore working on a law degree at Emory University. He also got his bachelor's degree in the US. "The US education system is next to none. And the US gives foreign students the opportunity to find a job there," he told the Global Times. "Not like in the UK, where it's hard for students to get legal working visas. That's why I chose to study in the US."

Zheng Yang's road to the US was a bit different from that of other students. After he graduated from high school in Shanghai, it took him two years to pass the TOEFL and prepare the other documents to obtain a student visa. He studied at Seattle Central Community College for two years before transferring to the University of California, Davis. "The US's mature educational system encourages and ensures such transfers," he told the Global Times. "There is always a better outlook as long as students study hard."

Simon Li will go to Stanford University to study finance. He said he wants to become a professor and the program in Stanford is prestigious.

Baucus also graduated from Stanford University. When he was a student there, he signed up for a program and spent six months in France, where one of Stanford's overseas campus is located, he recalled. After the program ended, he wanted more time because he still could not speak French, so he applied for another year.

"So from the August of 1962 to the August of 1963, I stayed in France and traveled all around Europe, Africa and Asia," he said. "It was one of the most interesting and formative periods of my life, and contributes to my work as US ambassador in China today as well."

Baucus believes that studying abroad at a young age shows an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit. He also took the example of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who studied in Iowa, in the US, when he was young.

"The world is getting smaller and its resources are diminishing, so people have to work hard to get along with each other, so we need to know each other's culture and find common solutions."

Studying abroad can accomplish that goal. "You are the future leaders of China. Some of you may go into government; some of you may do business; some of you may go into educations and be teachers. You will be leaders in different fields. Such experiences will help you learn a lot and know how to propel the mutual relationship between the US and China," Baucus said. "I am the ambassador of US to China. You are all ambassadors from China to the US. Americans will see China from your activities and performance."

Actually, this was the third time for Chen to apply for a US visa, he said. He has found that the process has become simpler. "In 2010, when I first applied for a US visa, I had to buy a cellphone card and kept dialing to make a visa interview, and I had to wait a long time at the visa center to be called," he said. "This year, I arranged the visa application online and I only spent 35 minutes in the visa center."

"There are a lot of ways that the visa application has been simplified," Grondelski told the Global Times. "Now, what most of the process applicants need to do is online, and we have tried to reduce the time that people spend here. The typical application time has been limited to within an hour."