2011-10-09   Source: CHINADAILY

Joel Griffi ths (left), an Australian who plays for China Super League soccer club Guo’an, chats with Australian Chamber of Commerce President David Olson and Ambassador Frances Adamson. MIKE PETERS / CHINA DAILY

In one of her last events in Shanghai before returning to the US, Consul General Beatrice Camp joined Tongji University officials to salute their students who participated in the US Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon last week in Washington, DC. Tongji University was one of 20 teams competing, and the only team from China.

The Tongji team used recycled shipping containers to construct a Y-shaped house, which Camp called "a clever reminder that Shanghai is the world's biggest shipping port. It also addresses the problem of affordable housing while offering ways to save energy."

"The Ashes," a test cricket series played between England and Australia, is one of the biggest rivalries in international sport and dates back to 1882. England is the current title holder after winning the real Ashes contest in 2009 and again in the 2010/11 series in Australia, and a team of cricketers (the Peking Ducks) from the British Embassy in Beijing visited the annual Great Aussie BBQ last weekend for a diplomatic reprise of the contest. Australia's new ambassador to China Frances Adamson handled the coin toss, which the Brits won, but from then on the game went the Aussie team's way, with a final score of 136-97.

The chief sponsor was Invocare, an Australia-based crematorium that's just entering the China market. That prompted some chuckles about ashes ("You have to have a sense of humor in this business," says Invocare's China CEO, Edward Chui.) The two embassies last played an "ashes" match in 1974; Australia won that contest, too, but the embassy somehow lost the trophy. Scott Strain, the British team captain and head of the UKTI China Financial Services Team at the embassy, said his squad hoped the event would now be resumed annually. Rain ended the embassies attempt to revive the tradition last year.

Finland's Ambassador to China Lars Backstrom and his wife, Brigitta, joined local officials at the Limin School for migrant workers' children last weekend for the launch of a mobile library. The bookmobile, donated by the Finnish elevator company Kone, will be at the suburban Beijing school for about 10 days before hitting the road, visiting other migrant schools in about 10 of China large cities each school year. "Tiny Finland has about 250 mobile libraries that visit rural areas of the country for the same purpose," says Tiina Herlin of Kobe's Centennial Foundation. Children at resource-pool migrant schools will get reading lessons from volunteers and, when possible, a donated bookshelf with about 5,000 books to start their own reading rooms.

"So the mobile library volunteers aren't just bringing and taking away," says Backstrom. "They are leaving knowledge behind wherever they go."

Herlin says the program is designed to inspire copycats around China and elsewhere.

The Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries saluted the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations of the Baltic nations with China late last month. The association hosted a reception for three ambassadors - Andres Unga of Estonia, Ingrida Levrence of Latvia and Lina Antanaviciene of Lithuania - and the staffs and invited guests of their embassies at the Peace Palace in the capital.

Danish Ambassador Friis Arne Petersen recently joined a 10th-anniversary celebration of the European Centre for Chinese Studies at Peking University. Peking University, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Tuebingen in Germany established the center a decade ago. In 2002 University of Frankfurt also joined the program.

During the past decade, 968 students from the four universities studied at ECCS, making it the program with the highest number of European students at Peking University.

Vice-Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun recently met with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was in China attending the third high-level dialogue of political parties between China and the United States.

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