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In June of this year, Barry Lesser, Professor Emeritus in the Department, will end his time as the Director of the China Program for the Department and for the Faculty of Science. The China Program in Economics was the first such Program in the Faculty of Science at Â鶹´«Ã½ and the first for the Department. The principal partner on the China side has been Shandong University of Finance and Economics in Jinan, China. But there was also a program with Renmin University of China in Beijing for 8-9 years, which ended in 2018, and relatively short-lived programs with Tianjin University in Tianjin, Southwest University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, and Jiangsu Second Normal University in Nanjing. The China Program has also been responsible for exchange programs with the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, Nanjing University in Nanjing, and Ocean University of China in Qingdao. The UIBE Exchange Program is the longest-running of these programs and is still going. In addition, although not in China, the China Program has developed a program with the University of Finance and Economics in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia and is responsible for running that program. A new Visiting Student Program with Shanxi University of Finance and Economics in Taiyuan is currently under development.

The first partnership in China for the Department was with Shandong University of Finance and Economics, the agreement for which was signed in 2006-07 and which recruited its first students from high school in China in 2008. This Program is an official Joint Program approved by the Ministry of Education of China. Students enter the program from high school and spend at least their first two years of study at SDUFE; after two years, students can decide to stay at SDUFE for two more years or to transfer to Â鶹´«Ã½ for their final two years of study. Students who choose to come to Â鶹´«Ã½ for two years receive degrees from both institutions; students who stay at SDUFE for all four years of their undergraduate program receive only a SDUFE degree, but they do take a set of courses for which Â鶹´«Ã½ recruits the instructors and which are conducted entirely in English. The SDUFE Program is now in its 18^th year of operation and over that time it has brought close to 400 students to Â鶹´«Ã½ for the final two years of undergraduate study and/or graduate study. In 7 of the last 12 graduations at Â鶹´«Ã½, the winner of the University Medal in Economics, which goes to the honours student graduating in Economics who has the highest GPA in the graduating class, has been a Program student from SDUFE. 70% of the SDUFE students who have now completed their undergraduate study at Â鶹´«Ã½ have gone on to graduate school in North America or the UK, including close to 40 students who have stayed at Â鶹´«Ã½ to do a MA or MDE.

Through all of this time, Barry Lesser has been the Director of the Program. Although he retired from the faculty at Â鶹´«Ã½ in 2012, he has continued post-retirement as the China Program Director up to the end of the current academic year. In this role, he has been ably assisted by Shannon Peng, who is now the Deputy-Director of the Program. Shannon first joined the Program in 2010. In 2013, Barry was made an honorary Professor of Economics at SDUFE. In 2016 he received an Ambassador of Friendship to Shandong Province Award from the Provincial Government of Shandong. In 2018, he received a Qilu Friendship Award from Shandong Province and in 2023, he received the award of Honorary Citizen of Shandong Province, which is the highest honour that a provincial government in China can bestow on a foreigner.

In the current political environment in Canada when the federal government has acted to restrict the number of international students coming to Canada to study, the China Program in Economics at Â鶹´«Ã½ offers an example of the important contribution that international students make to the Department, the university, the province and the country. The length of time the China Program in Economics at Â鶹´«Ã½ has lasted, the quality of the students it has brought to Â鶹´«Ã½ and the subsequent achievements of many of those students underline the benefits that come from such partnerships and from international students more generally.