Christmas and New Year Greetings

Dear staff, students, and friends,

Christmas and New Year are just around the corner. In retrospect, 2011 has been an unusual year for everyone. The global financial crisis and turmoil have brought unusual experiences to the whole world. And, it hasn’t been an ordinary year for Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) either, as it has registered a rapid and healthy development in 2011: Our graduates have, once again, with an outstanding performance, demonstrated their academic excellence through four years of study at XJTLU, which has proved the initial success of our vision, mission, operational ideology and educational mode. We have received increasing attention and acknowledgement from students, their parents, counterpart universities and society as a whole; XJTLU keeps growing in scale and size with a continuously stronger academic contingent and its education and supporting systems have made remarkable headway. We are all the more clear and confident about where XJTLU is heading, with the blueprint for the next step of development already in the pipeline.

In this season of retrospection and gratitude, first of all, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all staff members and students for your trust and support for the exploratory cause of XJTLU. It was with your joining us that the University was able to grow on a sound track and it was your contributions of intelligence that sculpted and accomplished our educational mode. In addition, I want to thank the alumni all around the world for their remarkable performance, which has won the University much honour and worldwide acclaim. I’d also like to express my appreciation to the students’ parents, governments at all levels and relevant agencies for their sustained trust and strong support. Finally, I would like to thank our friends all over society for your care, expectations and even criticism, which have kept driving us forward and led us to our final success.

XJTLU, now nearly six years old, has just finished its transition from toddlerhood to childhood and is about to enter its early youth to receive schooling. To secure better and healthier development, we have begun to prepare the strategic plan for the next phase of development. We can perceive XJTLU’s characteristics: “uniqueness”, “international”, “research-led” from its vision and mission, and it needs your suggestions and contributions about how to enrich and deepen them over the course of the next five years. The five-star educational model of XJTLU focuses on cultivating global citizens with international perceptions and competitiveness. To this end, we are required to transform students from children into responsible and capable citizens with independent decision-making awareness, from passive into active and research-based learning and from being used to examination-oriented education into being self-motivated towards interest-driven learning, which requires consistent participation and exploration from you all. Meanwhile, there is strong demand for your academic and research contributions to build up the academic culture of XJTLU, which centres on studies and takes aim at students’ healthy growth. What’s more, it needs your devotion to productive research and active social interactions to perform and fulfil XJTLU’s commitment to society and your sustained support towards its goal of exerting a strong influence on the reformation of higher education in China and the development of education in the world. We are expecting that we can stride forward side by side and make joint explorations with an open and pioneering mind on the way to grow strong and mature.

In the new year, XJTLU is trying to apply autonomous enrollment of students for the first time to push the reformation of the Chinese “Gaokao” system and will increase the number of international students; the rest of the north campus, which is under construction now, is to be operational and the construction of the south campus is to kick off; we will expand XJTLU’s postgraduate education; there is to be nearly another 100 academic and admin staff from across the world joining us; we are planning to unfold more research work in wider areas; and XJTLU will continue to strengthen its cooperation and partnership with different social sectors.

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, 2012 is the year of the dragon, which symbolises prosperity and strength. We sincerely hope that XJTLU can keep going from strength to strength in this well-blessed dragon year.

I hereby wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Professor Youmin Xi
Executive President of XJTLU
20 December 2011