By Heidegret Hilse

In December 2015, I had the opportunity to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the China Association for International Exchange of Personnel (CAIEP) in Beijing, and today I have the great honor to celebrate together with you the 30th anniversary of its Representative Offi ce in Germany.

Shortly after I started working in the China Department of the Senior Expert Service (SES) at Bonn in 1990, I got to know Professor Yuan Chengyu and his wife Professor Zhu Qi , fi rst appointed representatives in Cologne of CAIEP. This was the beginning of a close cooperation in the spirit of mutual understanding.

At that time channels of communication with foreign countries were limited and communication was rather diffi cult. In order to get in touch with Chinese requesting units in less developed parts of China that were interested in inviting German retired experts, the support of the Cologne Offi ce was indispensable. In addition, for several years the Cologne Offi ce was in charge of dealing with handling ticket matters of the international fl ights of our experts. So first thing for me to do, when I started my daily work in the offi ce at 7 o’clock in the morning, was giving a telephone call to the colleagues in the CAIEP Offi ce at Cologne.Regardless who worked there, this habit was kept until I retired from SES. This close cooperation did not only lead to a higher efficiency of the project work, but also resulted in developing long lasting friendships. Even though I retired from SES more than 11 years ago, I am still in touch with many former representatives starting with Professor Yuan Chengyu and his wife,their successors Mr. Liang Zhibin and Mr. Wang Xinmin as well as many, many others. Whenever there was and is a change of personnel in Cologne, new contacts were established and are still established which I think is quite unusual. I really do appreciate that and feel honored.

The Chinese Government initiated the National Friendship Award in 1991 in order to honor the contribution of foreign experts to developing China’s economy and science. Every year the award is given to 50 foreign experts from all over the world.In the beginning, there were at least one or two experts from SES among the friendship award winners each year, reaching a total number of more than 20 prize-winners in the course of time, a great number, if one takes into consideration that the number of friendship award winners from Germany totaled 188 until the end of 2017.

I would like to especially point out one of them: Mr. Hans-Heinz Stecker, who received the award in 1992 which means that he belongs to the first experts worldwide who won the friendship award. He also celebrates a 30th anniversary in 2017,because in 1987 he carried out his fi rst project as senior brewery expert in China, more precisely in the brewery of the city of Xi’an where he helped to improve the quality of the beer. The beer was named after him ‘Hans Beer’ and it is still available in Xi’an. (the article is the author’s speech on the 30th anniversary of the German Representative Offi ce of CAIEP)