Consul General focuses on personal relationships
Print Edition
Relations between Chile and China have gone through a very eventful period since Chilean Consul General Rodrigo Arcos took up his post in Shanghai in March last year.
In May 2015, Premier Li Keqiang visited Chile and 18 agreements were signed in various areas including trade, investment, culture and tourism. As a result of the agreements Chinese tourists can now get Chilean visas for free. And no visa is needed for individuals who already have a tourist visa from the US or Canada.
“Our work is to get closer to people, in other words, it is about people-to-people relations,” the Consul General tells Shanghai Daily.
“We have a very good and long relationship with China as the first South American country that recognized China (in 1970) and the first to sign a free trade agreement (in 2005). China is now our top trade partner. It is time to further extend that through more individual people-to-people relations,” he adds.
Arcos has always valued personal relationships as much as high-level collaborations.
He has put in considerable efforts into areas including culture, tourism and education, hoping to promote bilateral relations to a higher level in these areas.
He is particularly pleased to see the new visa agreements.
“We expect to see more tourists, more business travelers and it will also help improve investment and business possibilities, and promote more cultural exchanges,” Arcos says.
“Cultural exchange is part of the whole equation. Trade is important, but it’s not all of the exchanges. President Xi Jinping talks about the China Dream, and for dreaming, you need people. If more and more people from the two countries learn about each other, it is certainly easier to obtain more information, nurture more trust and this will lead to more collaboration.”
Memorandums have been signed recently between Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces with Chile’s Maule and BioBio regions, while more frequent delegation visits and closer collaborations can be expected.
Chilean musicians, artists and other cultural entities will be visiting Shanghai this summer. High schools in the two countries are discussing exchange student programs.
A competition commemorating Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American Nobel Laureate in Literature, has just started, with support from various local universities and institutions.
“I always see the relationship as a whole,” Arcos says. “You can’t understand the country if you don’t understand its culture and the way people express themselves. That is also part of my work here in Shanghai.”
His efforts in boosting people-to-people relationships and trying to understand more about the local mindset have gone beyond his office job and frequent business trips. Arcos has recently been involved in local charity initiatives, which he plans to continue.
“My way of looking at my work as a diplomat is that you have to be involved,” he says. “You have to make contact with people, and that makes a very important for me to be part of the charity program. Because through that, I can be connected with and can return something to the Chinese people.”
Arcos has also recently helped promote a new fundraising program organized by Grand Hotels Media for the Shanghai Smiles Foundation, which is committed to helping Chinese students from less developed regions get vocational and technical training and degrees in Shanghai, which will give them more employment options.
“As a diplomat, we are not just here trying to promote ourselves,” he says. “We are also a good partner who sincerely tries to understand local people, to cooperate and help with local causes.”
A career diplomat of 24 years now, Arcos has been stationed in Australia, Japan and Washington DC before being posted to Shanghai. He says he has been interested in and studied about Asia and Asian culture long before joining the Chilean Foreign Service.
He finds education a very appealing cause as he has also put a lot of work into further strengthening exchange programs between China and Chile.
“Education is the basis of everything,” he says. “If you have one student from a school who goes to China, all the school and the whole community will know where he is going, what he has seen and experienced and what China is like. It’s the same the other way around. The impact of one person could be huge in terms of cultural influence.”
One of his recent initiatives has been to further lower the age of exchange students, because learning Chinese takes a long time for foreigners, thus getting an earlier start may make a big difference.
“China is not the China I saw 10 or 15 years ago," he says. "It is also very different from us, the way we think and do things. We learn from each other through exchanges and we will continue to promote trade, investment, and will do more in the culture and tourism side, as well as identify areas we can have more impact.”
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