Professor Wenyi Lin

Welcome by the Public Orator

Vice-Chancellor,

This University is proud of is long-standing and rapidly growing connections with the People’s Republic of China. There is an increasing number of fruitful academic links and strengthening personal relationships, and there are special connections with universities and projects in Shanghai. In Beijing, during the time that Graeme Davies was our Vice-Chancellor, an accord was signed with Tsinghua University, one of the leading universities in China, which you yourself have endorsed and strengthened during the last ten years. In 1985, Madam Lin, who was then a lecturer in that University, came to spend three years as a Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics here in our University, working with Professor Michael Fang. Michael himself has worked with the Engineering Departments in Tsinghua, and it was they who suggested that Madam Lin should come to Liverpool.

Wenyi Lin comes from a family which was originally Taiwanese and bother her parents were trained in the medical profession. Between 1962 and 1968 she was an undergraduate at Tsinghua University in Beijing in their Department of Mechanical Engineering and, after working in industry, she returned there some ten years later as a postgraduate student, joining the academic staff as a Teacher immediately on completing her studies for her Master’s degree in 1981. She was appointed Lecturer at Tsinghua two years later, and it was in this capacity that she was seconded to work in Liverpool. Her research here formed the basis of her doctoral thesis when she returned home in 1988. In 1990 she was appointed Assistant Professor and, two years later, a full Professor at Tsinghua. During all these years she has done research into energy policies and particularly into clean energy and clean coal combustion technologies. She has also worked on numeric modelling of fluid flow, heat transfer and combustion. Despite the developments in different directions in her career during the last ten years, she still has a research interest in these fields and she continues to supervise some students in her Department, where she retains her Chair.

But in 1994 she was asked to become Deputy Director of the Bureau of Higher Education in Beijing and, two years later, Deputy Director of Beijing Municipal Education Commission. She moved on in less than a year to be Assistant Mayor of Beijing Municipal Government, stepping up in December 1996 to the post of Vice-Mayor, a post she continues to hold today. During the last six years she has taken on a wide-ranging portfolio of issues on behalf of the city. She now has responsibility for a series of citywide activities in education, science and technology, overseas affairs and information technology publishing. Her background in university education and environmentally-based energy research has provided her with an authorise basis for much wider public policy developments and governmental responsibility.

Her civic role in China’s capital city has brought with it a number of other chairmanships and presidencies concerned with university policies and standards and, on the wider community agenda, perhaps I can single out her chairmanship of the Beijing Women and Children Working Committee and the Overseas Exchange Association. She is honorary President of the China Universities Alumni Association and honorary Director of the Beijing Natural Science Foundation Committee. Because of her background she is also Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League and Chairman of the Beijing Committee of the League.

Madam Lin has built up an enviable record of public service to her country and especially to the great city of Beijing, developed form her strong and very thorough scholarly background and her career in teaching and research. China’s energy problems and the desperate need to keep pace with expansion, but at the same time to address the need for environmental conservation and reform, are of vital importance to the future well-being of the country. Her experience and her influence are a very important contribution to that evolving series of policies and we admire her courage in the difficult and onerous role she is now called upon to fulfil. We are proud too, that her research work here in Liverpool played a significant part in developing her ow stance on many of these difficult problems, and we wish her well in the future. We hope, too, that she will encourage other young postgraduates and research students, particularly from Tsinghua, to come to this University and keep that continuity of academic friendship and mutual development alive well into the future.

Vice-Chancellor, in the name of the Senate and of the Council, I present to you for admission to the degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) in this University, Wenyi Lin.