My China Story | Vicente Revello

My China story starts back home in Buenos Aires. I’d often come across brief news clips that compress China into a single economic or geopolitical headline. Throughout my undergraduate studies, however, I began to feel those clips were missing a lot. I wanted to know the people behind the numbers, uncover the ideas behind the buzzwords, and see the art behind the statistics. That curiosity pushed me to look past the usual stereotypes.

Serendipity helped. Each year of my BA I had professors who were Yenching Scholars. Their classes weren’t just lists of facts. We “thought with” Chinese ideas like tianxia, guanxi, and common prosperity (and asked what they might mean for Latin America). Their guidance made YCA feel close and doable. It also proved that dialogue between Buenos Aires and Beijing is not merely possible; it is already quietly alive in our classrooms.

My first gateway into East Asia was through Japan. Learning its language and history opened the door to the region, yet China remained the big mystery next door. Now, as I map out my career, diving into China’s culture, politics, and economy feels like the obvious next step.

Have I been to China yet? Not yet, and that makes me even more curious. I want to swap theories for street‑level experience: walk its cities, hear its dialects, and see how policy shows up in everyday life. Personally, I hope the immersion will test my assumptions and sharpen my empathy. Culturally, I want to track the shared threads linking Latin America and China.

For me, becoming a Yenching Scholar isn’t a finish line; it’s the entrance to a career‑long project to move beyond easy narratives about China and Latin America and open up the deeper conversations that we can build together.