Girls should dream big, too

Xiong Wanru, 22, a student from Yuanpei College at Peking University, says she senses the difference in her Wellesley College peers during the discussions in the seminar.

"In my class, girls perform better in grades, but are comparatively weak in leading activities and expressing ideas," she says. "I feel enlightened when I was having discussions with the students from Wellesley. They are very competent in expressing ideas. They are not shy at all."

Young insists that this is something that needs to be developed in educating women in China.

"I do not feel girls are different from boys, because we only have daughters in our family," says Young, who grew up with two sisters.

"And when we were younger, our parents encouraged us to do everything. They never said that there are things you may not do because you are girls, like becoming the president of the United States.

"They encouraged every good idea we had."

This attitude toward education stayed with Young all the way to college, when she entered Wellesley College in the early 1950s.

"I joined Wellesley College because girls were not allowed to enter comprehensive universities back then," she says.

Today, Wellesley College remains one of the best liberal arts colleges in the US.

"In the past, Wellesley aimed at educating girls only. Today, the value of Wellesley lies in nurturing their confidence in leadership," she says.

The confidence Young developed through her Wellesley days helped her career path when she joined General Motors in 1955.

"There was a period of time soon after I joined GM that the company kept losing money," she says. "And all the leaders changed. As a result, company morale was shaky. I was very persistent, and I stayed on."

In 1988, Young was appointed corporate vice-president of General Motors, a post she held until Dec 31, 1999.

She says the collaboration between Wellesley College and Peking University was first mooted a year ago.

"We want to spread our communication program worldwide, and China is our first stop," she says. "This is because Wellesley College has been having an increasing number of Chinese students in recent years, and Sino-US relationships also play a vital role."

Born and raised in a diplomatic family, Young's dream was to be involved in diplomacy in some form, a dream encouraged by her father, a diplomat, and her stepfather Ku Wei-chun, also known as V. K. Wellington Koo, China's first representative to the United Nations.

Although she devoted her career to business, Young did not give up her dream and realized it in 1989, when she became a Sino-US "cultural ambassador" with the founding of the Committee of 100.

The group, now consisting of more than 160 prominent Chinese-Americans, includes cellist Yo-Yo Ma, architect I. M. Pei, former American Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and figure skater Michelle Kwan.

As founder and now governor of the committee, Young has taken up the mission of introducing China and outstanding Chinese to the world over the past two decades.

"China is still a strange place to Americans to some extent. It has not completely internationalized by virtue of the language and different thought processes. It is always helpful to have a bridge," Young says.