Chancellor Feng, colleagues from Wuhan, Duke and Kunshan who built this venture together, faculty, parents, DKU Class of 2022: what an honor to speak at Duke's first undergraduate graduation.
On a happy day in August of 2018 I spoke to you as you entered college — do you remember？ After eight years of planning and building, we had a campus, we had a faculty, and that day we acquired the last ingredient we needed to bring DKU to life: brilliant talented students, students with a pioneering spirit who, from all the colleges in the world they could have chosen to attend, were attracted to this new school's promise of global education and 21st-century learning styles.
Four years later you did it!
You rose to every challenge you have made DKU known around the world through your achievements and now you are ready to go stake out your upright future for yourself.
Well done.
But let's be truthful: although you arrived successfully the road was not as straight or smooth as we had in mind.
Since China began emerging as a global superpower we've all known that there would be elements of both cooperation and competition in its relation with the United States.
DKU was conceived at the high water mark of the spirit of cooperation: a joint venture university is the perfect image of the ideal of engagement across bounds of difference.
Since then as we know relations between these powers have become much more competitive, more distrustful on both sides along multiple fronts but then geopolitical divisions were suddenly compounded by a much more literal separation.
As the COVID virus circled the world economies and population centers shut down, doors were slammed closed to prevent the spread of the infection, cross-border travel was terminated by most countries and having harmlessly traveled to celebrate a holiday, DKU students and faculty found themselves continents apart unable to rejoin the community they had so recently created.
