Feature: China's presence in Netherlands discussed prior to royal visit

Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, who are to pay their first official state visit to China end-October, attended a conference titled "China in the Netherlands" on Thursday that discussed China's presence in the Netherlands at a micro and macro level.

Experts from fields such as business, education, culture and media shared their experiences connecting the Netherlands and China at the conference held at Leiden University.

"Chinese have been living in the Netherlands for over a hundred years now. They form an exemplary minority of hard-working people," said the rector of Leiden University Carel Stolker in his opening speech. "In the last 20 years, this group of people has changed a lot. The second generation of Chinese in the Netherlands is often highly educated and very enterprising."

"Nowadays, more than half of the products we use daily are made or partly made in China. You could say that China is becoming more and more a normal part of our society. Many schools and companies will probably feel like this as well," he added.

Leiden University's study of Sinology dates back 150 years. In 1877, the university appointed its first professor of the Chinese language. Now it enrolls about 100 first-year students in China studies each year. The current secretary of the king has studied Chinese in Leiden, said Stolker.

Lase Hu, a second-generation Chinese immigrant in the Netherlands, told the forum: "I grew up with a cup of coffee representing the Dutch culture in one hand, and a cup of green tea representing the Chinese culture in the other hand."

Gabriella Esselbrugge, who owns a hotel-restaurant in Giethoorn, an idyllic village in the northeast of the Netherlands, said 72 percent of her guests are Chinese.

The village is providing more information in Chinese and more services targeting Chinese consumers, all tailor-made initiatives to cater to growing visitor numbers.

Bei Wang, another speaker of Chinese origin, told the audience that people in China nowadays know more about the Netherlands than the Dutch people would expect. "Their interest no longer just focuses on traditional icons such as wooden shoes, windmills and soccer, but also includes politics, business, social policies and so on," said Wang, a media and business consultant.

More Dutch schools are also offering Chinese language studies. Hans Crum, deputy principal of a secondary school teaching Chinese, said 15 percent of the students in his school have taken an introduction to the Chinese language.

The Dutch government recently announced Chinese language and culture will be an exam subject for higher level secondary school students in the Netherlands from 2017. Ahead of the implementation of this policy, Crum's school in 2006 became one of the first schools to conduct a pilot for this plan.

Conference organizer and professor of modern China studies at Leiden University Frank Pieke said China's relevance to the Netherlands is significant but underestimated.

Fokke Obbema, journalist at Dutch daily de Volkskrant and author of "China and the West -- Hope and Fear in the Age of Asia" called for a balanced approach towards China.

He believes there is no doubt that China will become more powerful, but China will certainly not eclipse the rest of the world.

"This balanced approach should enable the daily undercurrent of contact between people to continue to prosper," he said in his book. Endit