Remarkable meeting with Xi still fresh in memories

Editor’s note: China Daily publishes a series of articles reviewing President Xi Jinping’s visits to China and abroad over the past decade to present his vision for development in China and the world.

The meeting with President Xi Jinping took place nine years ago, but memories of Arsene Bilongo are so vivid that it could easily have been yesterday.

“The encounter, although very short, with President Xi is something I will remember all my life,” Bilongo said in an interview in June. “I still keep pictures of it in my laptop and see them often.”

Bilongo was in his first year of studies at the Confucius Institute of Marien Ngouabi University, in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, when President Xi visited the country in March 2013. During the visit, the Chinese leader spoke with students and teachers on campus after unveiling the university’s new library, built with Chinese assistance.

“I was watching a television program in a classroom at the institute when I saw President Xi arrive, accompanied by the President of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, and other officials and university professors” , Bilongo said in Chinese.

Bilongo, who also goes by the Chinese name Liu Tao, said he was aware the visit was approaching, but when Xi walked up to him and started addressing him, he became nervous.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god. This is President Xi, and this is not a dream.’ I was so excited that at first I could barely speak.”

Xi expressed interest in the TV program Bilongo was watching and asked what it was about, Bilongo recalled. He told Xi that the documentary, in Chinese, was about the development of railways in China.

He then told Xi that he was interested in Chinese language and culture and hoped to study in China.

“My Chinese wasn’t that fluent back then, so I spoke very little,” Bilongo said. “But President Xi listened intently with interest and kept smiling.”

Xi’s schedule was very busy and the conversation may have lasted less than two minutes, Bilongo said.

The visit was broadcast on local television that evening, Bilongo said, and he became a celebrity in college.

Wang Yongkang, president of the Confucius Institute at Marien Ngouabi University, who was also present that day, said in June that Xi also spoke with another Congolese student studying Chinese and a Congolese teacher teaching Chinese. Chinese at the institute.

“The Congolese teacher, whose Chinese name is Ai Jia, told President Xi that she had studied Chinese at a university in Hangzhou, and President Xi smiled and replied that he had also worked in the city. “Wang said.

Xi encouraged students to continue studying Chinese to contribute to China-ROC friendship, he said.

Xi also said the Republic of the Congo was a beautiful country with friendly and hospitable people, and he would come back if the opportunity arose, he added.

“Some people may think that as the president of a big country, President Xi may seem authoritative, but in reality he looked very amiable. The atmosphere was lively and relaxed,” said Mr Wang.

Earlier, Xi attended the opening ceremony of the China-ROC Friendship Hospital in the capital Brazzaville.

Together with his wife, Peng Liyuan, Xi met with members of a medical assistance team sent from China and thanked them for their work.

Medical assistance to Africa is a difficult but glorious task, and generations of Chinese people have provided medical services to Africans, which have won praise for China, Xi said.

During his visit to the Republic of Congo, Xi also delivered a speech to the country’s parliament in which he spoke warmly of the friendship between the two countries and expressed the hope that China and Africa will work together. more closely together.

Armand Moyikoua, rector of Marien Ngouabi University, recently told People’s Daily that it was an exciting speech, during which Xi also quoted a line from a poem by an African poet that expresses optimism for Africa’s progress and victory.

The poem resonated with the audience in parliament, and “on hearing this, everyone, including me, rose to their feet with enthusiasm, and the hall was filled with thunderous applause,” Moyikoua said.

In his speech, Xi thanked the ROC government and its people for helping to build a primary school in Qinghai province.

The Sino-Congolese Friendship Primary School was built, with a donation from the government of the Republic of Congo, in Chindu County of the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yushu after a series of severe earthquakes struck shook the prefecture in April 2010. The school was completed in July 2012. Its students wrote a letter of thanks to the President of the Republic of Congo Sassou Nguesso after it opened.

“On behalf of the students, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the government of the Republic of Congo and to the people,” Xi said in his speech.

In the Republic of the Congo, symbols of friendship between the two countries are ubiquitous, including the National Highway No. 1, the China-Republic of the Congo Friendship Hospital and the New Parliament Building, which are among the fruits of the collaboration of the two countries since the diplomatic Relations were established in 1964.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, China has provided aid, including vaccines, to the Republic of Congo and many other African countries.

China is the world’s largest supplier of COVID-19 vaccines.

In November, while addressing the opening ceremony of the Eighth Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Dakar, Senegal, President Xi announced that China would provide an additional 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Africa.

In two months, a new shipment of Chinese vaccines arrived in Brazzaville.

Moyikoua told People’s Daily that China and the Republic of Congo have been working closely together to fight COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and China was the first country to provide anti-pandemic materials and vaccines against COVID-19 to the Republic of Congo. This demonstrated the deep friendship between the two countries, he said.

Three months after meeting Xi, Bilongo won a scholarship to study Chinese at Jinan University in Shandong Province.

When he graduated from Marien Ngouabi University, he attended Jinan University for the second time to study Chinese. In 2018, he started working in a Chinese oil company in the Republic of Congo and is now a director.

“Studying Chinese gave me a lot of opportunities,” he said. “It gave me the chance to meet President Xi and study in China, and then find a job in a Chinese company.”

Many of his classmates at the Confucius Institute also got jobs, for example as translators, at Chinese companies in the Republic of Congo, he said.

In its first year in 2013, the Confucius Institute at Marien Ngouabi University had nearly 200 students, and in 2018 and 2019, the number of new school enrollments reached 1,000, Wang said.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number has dropped to around 600 students in each of the past two years, he said.

The institute has set up more than 20 Chinese teaching centers in primary and secondary schools in the Republic of Congo, training about 10,000 people every year. More than 120 students from the institute have studied on scholarships at Chinese universities, he said.