Campus President Roy Heynderickx is traveling with vice president for international programs Josephine Yung to sign agreements that further student and faculty exchanges across the Pacific Ocean, according to the school.
Gregoire’s trip is to last 11 days; she departs Seattle on Sept. 13 and is set to stop in China and Vietnam. The trip’s focus is on boosting exports including farm products from Eastern Washington, boosting foreign investment and promoting higher education.
State commerce director Rogers Weed and agriculture director Dan Newhouse plan to attend the Shanghai World Expo and help Gregoire promote state products.
The entourage also plans to stop for Saint Martin’s ceremony in Beijing with Tianjin Foreign Studies University on Sept. 15, then with the Shanghai Maritime University and the Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine University, both Sept. 17. The agreements are aimed at promoting student exchanges.
“Practically speaking, it does help our enrollments, but it also helps our students be aware culturally outside our university,” said Genevieve Canceko Chan, vice president of marketing and communications for the Lacey-based Benedictine school that serves about 2,200 full- and part-time students at several campuses. “It’s an increasingly global economy.”
The ceremony with the maritime school is to commemorate a 10-year relationship that lets Chinese students attend business and accounting classes in Lacey. About 10 students attend full time for a year at a time.
The Tianjin agreement will let Chinese students attend a master’s in education program at Saint Martin’s.
“We’re going to be sending our faculty over in spring 2011 to provide some preparatory classes and ESL (language) training. Then their students will be coming over in fall 2011,” Canceko Chan said.
The number of students to attend initially is not set and might depend on students’ facility with English.
The agreement with the traditional medicine school builds on cultural exchanges with Saint Martin’s that go back to 2005. Saint Martin’s is reinstating its nursing program, and “we’d love to add a strand involving traditional Chinese medicine to the nursing program,” Canceko Chan said.
Medical faculty from China are to visit Lacey in the spring to discuss what Saint Martin’s might need to add to its programs and training so local students can go to Shanghai for training in traditional medicine.
Gregoire has made a handful of foreign trade trips since taking office in 2005, including one to China and Japan that year. Her office put out a news release last week claiming the first trip yielded more than $6 million in new contracts in China for Washington businesses and $1 million in new sales to customers in Japan.
The Tri-City Herald reported this week that economic-development advocates from the Tri-Cities hope to get more companies such as GCL Solar in China to invest in the region’s technology sector. The company recently opened a plant in Richland that is to develop cheaper and better ways to produce and process silica used in solar applications.
And Gregoire said in a statement that “the fact that so many private businesses and companies are willing to join me on this trip signifies its importance … They know – as do I – the value of meeting face to face with key leaders in Asia to help sell our state as the best place to do business.”
She said she is confident it will lead to more exports, “which will in turn create new jobs.”
Brad Shannon: 360-753-1688 bshannon@theolympian.com www.theolympian.com/politicsblog
