Cultural exchanges 'can improve understanding'

　　Steady cultural exchanges, such as those during the "Year of China" in Russia this year, will help the two neighbors understand each other better and become "good friends".

　　That's what Alexey Rodionov, a promising young Russian scholar on Chinese language and literature, said in an online interview with China Daily.

　　The St Petersburg State University's Confucius Institute deputy director, whose love of Chinese literature and culture is exemplary, said a three-volume collection of contemporary Chinese writers' works would hit the shelves in Russia in late summer.

　　"The collection will be a breakthrough and allow Russians to read the works of writers other than Zhuang Zi or Li Bai."

　　Such is his understanding of Chinese and his own culture and so vast is his knowledge of literature and communication that he sounds prophetic when he says: "Cultural communication can work as a thermos to maintain the warmth in a relationship and pass it down from one generation to another."

　　Rodionov attaches high value to continuous cultural dialogue, and considers literature to be an important tool for cultural communication.

　　"Our world may be more harmonious and peaceful if Russia and other Western countries pay more attention to China and understand more about the Doctrine of Mean and other teachings of Confucius," he said.

　　He still remembers the time when people-to-people exchanges between Russia and China were disrupted. But for him China has always been close to home because he grew up in Blagoveschensk, with Heihe in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province just across the Heilongjiang River.

　　But despite that, "China was also as far as the moon", Rodionov said, because of Russians' baseless fear of their neighbors. He recalls huge posters saying: "Beware, comrades, the border to the country dominated by Mao Zedong Thought is only 1 km away."

　　He, however, chose his path with conviction, for he wanted a lifelong association with China.

　　Before 1986, he said, only three or four Chinese were living in his home city. But by the late 1980s, the Chinese had become a part of the local life, encouraging him further to major in Chinese in college.

　　"The competition (for Chinese language studies) was fierce at the time and it has continued to be the same," he said.

　　In a year, he discovered that China had more to offer than down jackets, vegetables and chopsticks.