In July this year, several Singaporean "post-90s" university students participated in the 2015 "Seeing China: Foreign Youth Video Project", they came to Northwest China to record modern China with their lenses, and understand and convey Chinese culture through elements such as Qin dialect, Lanzhou beef noodles, and sheepskin rafts. Two university students who came to the National University of Singapore from China to study in one year filmed the dream stories of 50 local Singaporean characters. I believe that there are many more such cases around the students here.

-- "Deepening Partnership for a Better Home in Asia – Speech at the National University of Singapore" (November 7, 2015)

Further reading:

Co-sponsored by the Institute of International Communication of Chinese Culture at Beijing Normal University and the Huilin Cultural Foundation, the "Seeing China: Foreign Youth Video Project" is a cultural experience activity for foreign young people to observe China from their own unique perspectives, tell Chinese stories, record Chinese style, and show Chinese spirit through independent shooting. In 2015, 100 young university students from 20 countries participated in the project, and they filmed 100 short documentaries on the theme of "People, Family, Country". Among them, there are "Chopsticks: Yin and Yang in Qingdao", which explores China's yin and yang balance culture through "chopsticks", "Let's Have a Bowl of Lanzhou Beef Noodles", which uses beef noodles as a clue to think about "home" culture, and "Accompaniment", which focuses on an old couple who have been doing logistics work in colleges and universities for many years...... Close contact, continuous tracking, and in-depth observation allowed them to "see a different China". After 17 days of filming in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, one participant said that he "changed his traditional impression of a city in western China and saw a new city in northwest China where tradition and modernity are intertwined."

In the same "perspective of the other", two Chinese university students recorded the stories of 50 Singaporean locals on camera, which also made people "feel the great power of dreams". Among these 50 people, the youngest has just been born for a few days, and the oldest is 97 years old. The first exhibition of photography was in a shopping mall, and the people who came to see it were basically local people passing by. After seeing the exhibition, they lamented that there were not only members of the "Flying Tigers" who participated in the war against Japan, but also wood carvers who had polished countless works for decades, and watchmen who used grassroots bookstores to build a lush "cultural protection forest...... What touches people is that there are so many touching stories; The one who sighs is that these stories are all around him, but he has not discovered them.

"If you don't suffer from others, you don't know yourself, and you don't know people when you suffer from them." On November 7, 2015, Xi Jinping gave a speech at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to tell the story of Chinese and New Zealand university students exploring and discovering each other's countries, which not only shows that the baton of friendship between the two countries is being taken over by the younger generation of the two countries, but also shows that friendship can only be enhanced through deepening understanding and mutual learning.

Every journey of civilization exploration, every trip of in-depth exchanges, is an opportunity to dismantle the spiritual wall. Xi Jinping has repeatedly extended invitations to people around the world, warmly welcoming them to perceive and understand China, and stressed, "To understand China, we cannot just look at one point and one face, and we must avoid blind people touching the elephant" "We look forward to time to eliminate all kinds of prejudices and misunderstandings, and also hope that the outside world can observe China from an objective, historical and multi-dimensional perspective, and truly understand a comprehensive, true and three-dimensional China." In his view, "if political, economic, and security cooperation is the rigid force to promote the development of state-to-state relations, then people-to-people exchanges are the soft force for people to strengthen their feelings and communicate their hearts." Only by bringing the two forces together can we better promote the sincerity and compatibility of all countries."