On December 16, Ms. Liao Minmin, the Deputy Director-general of CSC (Civil Service College) International, headed a delegation to pay an official visit to SAI (Shanghai Administration Institute). Mr. Guo Qingsong, vice president of SAI, hosted a talk with them.

    Guo pointed out that SAI is now adopting a group school-running system as 1+5. “1” stands for the main campus, carrying out comprehensive training. “5” means five branches of SAI, delivering the corresponding training of civil servants and managerial staff in the following public sectors respectively: culture and government publicity, politics and laws, urban construction and transportation, science and technology & education and healthcare, economy management and state-owned enterprises. When talking about SAI’s function as a research base and think tank, Guo said that the teaching members of SAI were very active in applying for the “National Major Projects of Social Science” and offering consulting reports for government decision-making, many of which had been approved positively by Shanghai government leaders. In recent years, SAI developed its teaching methods from classroom lecturing to multi-method teaching, such as case study, seminar teaching, on-site teaching and simulation teaching. SAI possesses four simulation training labs for emergency management, communication with the media, psychological adjustment and financial operation. Besides, the training contents were becoming more practical, focusing more and more on contemporary situations of China and hot topics of government reforms. SAI was now seeing official training as a work platform, by which many commonly important and tough issues could be discussed in the process of training, and thus the trainees could find out clear solutions to the problem in their work through training. Finally, Guo was proud of SAI’s internationalization. He emphasized that SAI has maintained relatively stable cooperation partnership with more than 30 well-known universities and training institutes all over the world. By cooperating and sharing resources with them, SAI is now running many programs extensively in public servants training, research, visiting scholars, bilateral and international conferences, and postgraduate-exchange programs, which greatly improves SAI’s comprehensive strength in public servants training.

    Ms. Liao Minmin referred to that Civil Service College of Singapore and Shanghai Administration Institute established cooperative relationship in 2004. Through over 10-year communication, the two sides were developing a lot of cooperative programs such as public servants training, visiting scholar, international conference and high-ranking delegation. She said that she took office newly in the present position. She came all the way to visit SAI with the aim of learning more about SAI and enlarging the cooperation scope. Liao also shared CSC’s training programs on government credit, administration integration and serving the people and the reforms on training methods.