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A grand art performance was staged last evening on
the lawn of Fudan University to celebrate the university's centennial
anniversary on September 24.
Shanghai Fudan University celebrated its centennial anniversary yesterday and
Chinese President Hu Jintao sent a letter to express his congratulation to the
university.
The celebration attracted about 5,000 people from all walks of
life, including the presidents of about 100 world prestigious colleges and
universities from home and abroad.
Fudan University is the first university
set up by the Chinese people independently and it has shared the same fate along
with China in the past century, Hu said in his letter.
The university has
become more influential in the past century especially after the founding of the
new China in 1949 and it has cultivated a lot of outstanding intellectuals for
the country, Hu said.
Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of
China's National People's Congress (NPC), attended the ceremony and made a
speech.
The course of great changes in Fudan reveals that a university's fate
is closely related with a country's fate, said Wu at the ceremony. The
development of the country is a precondition for the university's development,
while the development of the universities is also an important support to the
development of the country, he said.
"We are very proud of our alma mater and
we also feel the responsibilities to contribute more for the society and the
country, as graduates from Fudan," said Li Daqian, an academician with the
Chinese Academy of Sciences, at the ceremony.
Fudan University was founded in
1905 with four classrooms and 160 students. Now it's one of the prestigious
universities in China with about 30,000 students.