USCET staff member Trenton Marsolek was one of 150 delegates selected from thousands of applicants to participate in this year’s Yenching Global Symposium held April 16-18th. The Yenching Global Symposium is an annual interdisciplinary conference on China hosted by the Yenching Academy at Peking University. This year, the theme of the symposium was “Shared Renewal: Recoupling East with West” and focused on the many challenges in China and throughout the world emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I enjoyed the opportunity to meet my fellow delegates who came from over 60 different countries and a very diverse set of backgrounds,” said Trenton. “Although we could not meet in Beijing due to the pandemic, I was impressed by the way in which we were all able to connect with one another using online platforms like Zoom, Slack, and LinkedIn,” he added. A graduate student in International Relations at Tsinghua University, Trenton was particularly interested in discussions about US-China relations. “It was interesting to hear from both Chinese and global perspectives about strategic competition between the US and China, especially in regards to its impacts on countries in Africa and Southeast Asia,” he said.