Youth gathering celebrates time-tested China-Russia ties

Updated: 2012-01-19 08:27

By Zhao Shengnan (China Daily)

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 Youth gathering celebrates time-tested China-Russia ties

Chinese and Russian young people make dumplings to celebrate the upcoming Spring Festival at the Russian embassy in Beijing on Monday. Wang Jing / China Daily

Performances, dumpling-making mark upcoming Spring Festival

BEIJING - When Wang Minpei was watching the Spring Festival performance at the Russian embassy on Monday, she clearly remembered the first time she took part in a similar event in 1954.

"A group of elementary school students from China and the Soviet Union sang a song named The Friendship Between Chinese and Soviet Children in the same room as today's performance," she said.

Around 70 Chinese college students from Beijing, as well as Hebei, Sichuan and Liaoning provinces, came to the Russian embassy in Beijing on Monday to celebrate the upcoming Spring Festival with Russian Ambassador to China Sergey Sergeevich Razov.

Chinese students made dumplings with their Russian counterparts, and then enjoyed Russian songs and dances performed by Russian children in Beijing.

Razov said he wished Chinese young people could get a better understanding of Russia and its culture in order to further boost bilateral ties.

Fang Yang, 18, a student from Minzu University of China, said that Russian and Chinese cultures share some core values.

"Although Russian and Chinese dumplings are different in terms of their contents and shape, their meaning is similar - blessings for families and friendship," he said.

Wang, 70, said her generation has a special interest in Russia, as Russian was the most popular foreign language taught at school in the 1950s.

"I kept contact with a pen pal in Moscow from 1958 to 1960," she said.

Wang Yingtong, 18, from Beijing Foreign Studies University, said that although she knew little about Russia before, the Spring Festival performance had inspired her to visit Russian in the future.

"I saw confidence and hospitality in the faces of the Russian dancers today. It would be fun to tour a country with so much cultural heritage," she said.

This year marks Sino-Russian Tourism Year, a platform to display the abundant tourism resources of the two countries. Official statistics show that the number of Chinese tourists visiting Russia during the first nine months of 2011 increased 52 percent.

China Daily

(China Daily 01/19/2012 page10)