New Partnership in China!
Cooperation agreement with the Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College
Over the past three months Magnus and Huaichuan have been working on establishing a formal collaboration between the TRODITIES project and the Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College. After numerous emails and wechat conversations between Huaichuan and officials at the College in Yiwu, as well as exchanges of MoUs (Memorandum of understanding), the University of Sussex and the Yiwu Industrial and Commercial Collaboration formally entered into a formal relationship with one another in the first week of January 2016. As neither Magnus nor Huaichuan had sought to establish such a formal institutional collaboration before, the process was revealing. It involved working with two very different types of higher education bureaucracies, and dealing with lots of apparently minor issues, such as where on the official agreement the institutional stamps should be imprinted. While the University of Sussex wished to sign and send the agreement electronically, it was important for the College that original hard copies were sent, signed and stored.
The relationship with the College will be crucial for the project for all sorts of reasons. We are looking forward to interacting with staff and students there. Indeed, two staff members of the College will join the project's China Advisory Board - a Board that is being established to cement relationships with institutions and individuals in China. The student body of the university is also very important to the project - we hope to involve those who are interested in the research activities of TRODITIES and to provide some relevant social science methodology training. Indeed, the college student body are interesting in their own right: there are several hundred foreign students registered at the college, many of whom are the children and relatives of the international traders who live in the city.
The next step is to travel to Yiwu in order to meet staff and students at the College in person. On a more personal note, some of Magnus' anxieties about conducting research in the city have been lessened during his interactions with staff from the college: one senior member of staff there has said she has a child of a similar age to Robin (Magnus and Diana's son), and she hopes that they will be able to play with one another!