9月7日，浙江大学国际联合商学院（浙大ZIBS）在海宁国际校区举办2019级新生欢迎会，迎来了20多个国家和地区的中外新生。其中包括53名首届iMBA班同学和50名第十届MCS中国学硕士项目同学。ZIBS院长贲圣林教授在欢迎会上以“志之所趋 无远弗届”为题发表致辞，勉励大家做有志者，与ZIBS一起改变世界，引领未来！
Teachers' Day老师的勉励受益终生
值此第35个教师节之际
祝天下所有老师开心快乐，幸福安康！
NO Limitation for Aspiration志之所趋 无远弗届Professor and Dean, International Business School,
下午好！
Dear
Class 2019 iMBA,
Class 2019 Master of China Studies,
Professor He Lianzhen, Vice President of Zhejiang University, Party Secretary FU Qiang, Prof K.C. Ting, Mr Peng Linjun of Haining City Government, Mr. Soh Hang Kwang, Vice Chairman of Rabobank, my friend Megan Hu and Andrew Swain, colleagues, friends and family of ZIBS, ladies and gentlemen,
Good afternoon!
It is my great pleasure and privilege to welcome you all to the opening ceremony of our ZIBS Inaugural Classes.
We started our incredible journey last November from this very room in the presence of leaders from the university, the government and private sector as well as friends and family from all across the world.
On that occasion, we announced our aspiration to build ZIBS as a premier global business school from China, focused on new technologies, new markets and new industries, in the era of the new global economy.
We also highlighted 5 i’s as our strategic pillars, which are: interdisciplinary, international, innovative, inclusive and integrative! And I will…spell these out for us.
Cross fertilization is key to the success of today’s businesses, business schools and students given the impact of rapidly changing technologies in an increasingly inter-connected world. We are blessed with the advantage of depth in the cross-disciplinary expertise we can draw from Zhejiang University’s unrivaled, diverse subject areas. Today ZIBS professors are not just from business and management, not just from finance and economics, but also from mathematics, biomedical engineering, and computer science. We will be inviting more professors from different schools of Zhejiang University, and especially our joint institutes with UIUC and University of Edinburgh, to join ZIBS as our Affiliate Professors. Our Visiting Professor program has already attracted senior faculty members from our partner institutions across the world, including Cambridge University.
Corporate partnership is a key focus of ZIBS, and attracting senior business leaders to join our faculty is a top priority. In this area we have made some exciting progress by concluding strategic partnership with a number of leading global companies, including Ant Financial, the global leader in fintech. As part of this agreement we will have at least 10 senior executives from Ant Financial to join our distinguished faculty as Adjunct Professors, with the first one to start teaching on Sept 21! We will also be welcoming business leaders from home and abroad to join us as Professors of Practice. Later today we will be welcoming Mr. Soh Hang Kwang, Vice Chairman of Rabobank to our faculty. The presence of senior business leaders on our faculty will bring the latest insights and a wealth of experience to our School, enabling our students to learn not just the theory, but also what actually works in real world. The other focus for our innovative approach is to create a digital ZIBS, that offers our learners the flexibility to take courses at their own speed, anytime from anywhere in the world.
We believe that inclusiveness is not just desirable, it is an indispensable part of ZIBS as an emerging global ecosystem. The world is not supposed to be, and should have never become, just for the privileged few. As our top priority, ZIBS is committed to building an inclusive school that provides access and development opportunities to individuals, communities and the world. Our door is always open for collaboration and partnership with institutions and individuals across the world. It is critical for ZIBS’ own sustainable growth in the future, and equally important for our friends and partners around the world, given climate change and other challenges facing us. Human beings have embarked on the essential journey of green and sustainable development, and we want to contribute our part, however small it might be.
We are proud of our small, yet diverse, ZIBS team. Its members hail from, or have worked or studied, in a rich variety of countries across the world. We are committed to providing first-class education to people from across the world, and I am delighted that 20 countries and nationalities are represented here today. While we are striving to be international, we will be proudly maintaining our Chinese characteristics and our Chinese roots. Though the balancing act is not always easy, we are confident that we are on the right track, as we all share a common vision and a common aspiration: building a premier global business school from China.
With 122 years of rich history, Zhejiang University is blessed with an extensive network of alumni across the world--700,000 alumni, spread in all fields, and in all continents. In North America alone, we have over 30,000 alumni! In Alibaba group, Zhejiang University alumni represent about 10% of their workforce. Our alumni are doing so well that Alibaba would like to raise that % even higher. We are also located in the hub of Zhejiang - the center of Chinese entrepreneurship. Zhejiang entrepreneurs, or Zheshang in short, are among the most innovative, entrepreneurial, successful and international in China. Today you can find them and other Chinese companies in every corner of the world: Rome in Italy, Stockholm in Sweden, Cape Town in S Africa, Nairobi in Kenya, São Paulo in Brazil, San Francisco in US, or Jakarta in Indonesia. Imagine the enormous potential of this network and the value we can unlock, for you and them, if we can realize our aspiration to integrate these most successful entrepreneurs and innovative companies from around the world into the ZIBS global ecosystem!
721 years ago, on Sept 7, 1298, the legendary Italian Marco Polo started writing his memoirs about his incredible journey in the Orient, in China, including this part of country. Today, millions of Chinese are traveling the world and millions from the world visit us each year. Many Chinese have been great members in their overseas hosting countries, and many international friends have chosen to work and study in China. You are the modern-day Marco Polos, both inbound and outbound. And to continue the analogy, our aspiration is to be the Marco Polo business school of today, helping connect ideas, which help shape the future!
This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the May 4 Youth Festival in China. In 1919, after 1st World War was over, and the world powers were negotiating the settlement for a peace deal. Believe it or not, China was luckily on the winning side of the war, and as such should have got back some Chinese cities like Tsingtao (where the famous Tsingtao beer is brewed) previously occupied by the losing side. To the surprise of the Chinese, these cities were given to other foreign imperial powers on the winning side, instead of being given back to China. That sparked a nationwide Chinese student demonstration on May 4, calling for a more modern and stronger China. Two years later, and against this background, the Chinese Communist Party was founded with the aspiration: to establish a strong and independent China.
By now, you will know why our theme today is focused on aspiration. It is derived from a famous Chinese saying“志之所趋，无远弗届”in Chinese, or NO Limitation for Aspirations in English, which means that you can achieve your goal as long as you have the aspiration and determination. The closest in English I can think of is “When there is a will, there is a way”.
It is gratifying to see that the aspiration from the May 4 Movement generation and Chinese Communist Party for a more modern China has been largely realized in one shape or another! On October 1, we will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of The People’s Republic of China and the remarkable aspiration achieved. While we rightly and proudly celebrate our success in achieving the aspiration, we should not and will not forget the contribution our previous generations have made, their incredible determination, diligence and sacrifice for their aspiration! It is their dedication, effort and sacrifice that have made it possible for us to enjoy what we have today. In fact we are harvesting the fruit of their work. As the Chinese idiom says: Plant in Spring and Harvest in Autumn or 春华秋实 in Chinese！Equally we should not forget many challenges we are still facing today in China and across the world, and more importantly, we should not forget our collective responsibilities to help make the world a better place, as we owe our future generations the fiduciary responsibility for a more livable world, just like our previous generation did to us.
Ladies and gentlemen, the world is changing rapidly, and we are entering uncharted territory, with the lighting speed of technological advancement, unpredictable geopolitical tensions around the world and the worsening effects of climate change. These changes bring daunting challenges and exciting opportunities. As a generation, you have many opportunities that my generation would have died to have had. You also face many challenges that my generation did not have to worry about. Each generation has his fair share of challenges and opportunities, his own best of times and his own worst of times, just as the famous quote of British novelist Charles Dickens says: “It was the best of times, it was worst of times”. It is my aspiration: that one thing you can learn from ZIBS is to turn the worst into the best, turn challenges into opportunities.
Autumn is a good season not just for harvesting, but also for celebration and family union. In North America, thanksgiving is celebrated widely. Next Saturday, we in China will be celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival, an important occasion for family members to get together. For many of you especially those from overseas, you may not be able to spend the time with your family, it is again my humble aspiration that you will find our community, Zhejiang University and ZIBS in particular, a warm family away from your family.
In closing, I want to thank you for and congratulate you on choosing Zhejiang University and ZIBS as your learning partner. It is an incredible journey that we will be traveling together, and I wish all of you great success and fun along the way, together, achieving our common aspirations, not just a great ZIBS, but a better world for us all.