Honoring the work of friends from afar

How delightful to have friends come from afar, Confucius said 2,500 years ago. Last Wednesday China's Shandong province, the hometown of Confucius, gave friendship awards to 26 foreigners from 11 countries.

The Qilu Friendship Award is the province's highest honor in recognition of the contribution made by foreigners' to Shandong's social and economic development.

This year's recipients work in 13 fields including agriculture, education, machinery, physics and biology.

"I am glad to see that my work in the city is recognized," said one of the recipients, Heinz-Rolf Stock from Germany, who is enjoying life on the coast in Yantai.

"Yantai is a nice city with beautiful beaches, and the people in the city are friendly," he said.

Stock worked for more than 25 years in the city of Bremen, Germany in the field of materials science. He is now working in Yantai Shield Advanced Material Co Ltd.

Shandong, a wealthy coastal region with nearly 100 million people, is keen to attract foreign talent to promote its growth.

"Foreign professionals have become a major force in driving Shandong's economic and social development. Shandong will carry out human resources policies to ensure the rights of foreign experts and provide them with comfortable living conditions," said Sun Wei, Shandong's deputy governor.

Statistics from the Shandong provincial administration of foreign experts affairs show foreigners working in Shandong brought in 1,173 new technologies and measures last year that helped tackle 2,514 problems, and generated 6.93 billion yuan ($1.13 billion) in economic benefits.

Liu Jie, head of the Shandong provincial administration for foreign experts affairs, said Shandong is working on building foreign expert bases in county-level regions to ensure the grassroots benefit from the achievements made by foreign experts.

To date, 169 bases have been built across Shandong, covering the province's 139 county-level cities. And 141 projects initiated by foreign experts have promoted more than 210 technologies and benefited 200,000 rural families.

Foreign experts have helped update technologies in the fields of manufacturing, electronics, medicine and agricultural processing.

With the help of experts from Denmark, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, South Korea and America, the Yantai-based North Andre Juice Co Ltd has developed into one of the world's major concentrated juice producers and the largest fruit pectin producer in the Asian-Pacific region.

To honor the contribution of foreign experts to Shandong, the provincial government set up the Qilu Friendship Award in 1993. To date, 417 foreigners have been honored.

The province has established long-term cooperation relationships with more than 100 organizations in 25 countries and regions. Germany has recommended 1,089 retired experts to Shandong.

Contact the writers at zhaoruixue@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/19/2014 page12)