2024 marks the 700^th anniversary of the death of Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller and merchant who crossed Asia to spend time in China, before returning to Venice to write about his travels and in turn helping initiate a new golden age of exploration, trade and connection between East and West. This year we at Warwick have been celebrating this anniversary through our Marco Polo International Programme – a series of academic conferences, educational exchanges and community events on campus, at our Warwick Venice Centre and with our global partners in China and elsewhere – to underline the power, importance and impact of cultural exchange and engagement, in the past and the present (check out www.warwick.ac.uk/mpip for more details).

I have spent this week in Shanghai, as part of our Marco Polo International Programme, with colleagues from the International Executive and International Strategy and Relations team. My time here began by participating in a conference organised by two of our key global partner universities, Ca Foscari in Venice and Fudan University in Shanghai, on the impact of Marco Polo. The conference took place in Zhujiajiao, often called ‘the Venice of Shanghai’ because of its canal waterways, crossed by a multitude of bridges. Our group, composed of UK, Italian and Chinese scholars also came back together later in the week to visit the newly opened Marco Polo exhibition in Shanghai Museum, which showcased pieces from museums in Italy and across China chosen to bring alive the places Marco Polo lived and visited. The standout piece for me, however, was a 19^th century Chinese statue of Marco Polo – rendering this Venetian into traditional Chinese sculptural style.

Following the conference, my focus moved to Warwick’s current range of connections and collaborations with some of the most prestigious Universities in China. We visited with colleagues at one of the newest private research-intensive universities in the country: the Eastern Institute of Technology in Ningbo, with whom we are building a joint PhD programme as well as UG international educational exchange, to see their campus coming into being, ready to welcome students from Autumn 2025.

From there we returned to central Shanghai to meet with the President of Fudan University, which will celebrate in 2025 its 120^th anniversary as we celebrate our 60^th. The President and I formally launched our first joint research seed fund, which will open for applications after Chinese New Year in 2025, as well as progressed discussions on our plans for a joint research institute, in addition to developing increased student mobility and international educational opportunities. This was a very special visit for me as Fudan’s Department of History was where I gave my first academic paper in China back in 2017 and it was a pleasure to connect also with research colleagues once again.

Our other very strong partner in Shanghai is Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), which is the second oldest University in China, founded in 1896. We have had a successful joint research seed fund with SJTU since 2019, supporting over 40 different research projects, across all the disciplines, to flourish. In 2024, SJTU have also been an active partner in our Marco Polo International Programme, hosting key conferences and participating in a series of workshops. And in 2025 we will welcome our first joint Warwick-SJTU PhD students, alongside continuing to support a wider range of student mobility and international education opportunities, like the Warwick-SJTU Global Challenge programme, which we developed together. We discussed the next steps in formalizing the increasingly large community of Warwick-SJTU collaborators across our institutions, and how best to support their success going forward, as well as continuing to broaden our partnership, and how best to take advantage of the fact that we share a number of global partners around the world, like Monash in Australia.

This trip has left me in no doubt about the energy and enthusiasm for collaboration between the staff and students of Warwick and those of our Chinese partners as well as the value and impact those collaborations can bring. We are working closely with some of the most prestigious universities in China, which brings with it opportunities for new research breakthroughs and associated international grant success; as well as more opportunities for our current students to gain important international exposure and experience. Crucially, these partnerships also give Warwick enhanced credibility and visibility across China, particularly in the eyes of those Chinese students who are considering travelling abroad for their university education, making us a more obvious choice to apply to.

Of course working with China has its complications, in terms of differences in research culture and approach, as well as the wider concerns about research security. We take these risks seriously and mitigate them not only through our careful choice of trusted research partners, but also with the help of thorough research security protocols and checks at Warwick. The upbeat mood coming from recent interactions between the UK and Chinese governments have set the tone for interaction on issues that we both care about within a context of recognition of the differences and disagreements between us. After all, as the story told by Marco Polo reminds us, recognising our differences is as important as celebrating our similarities.