3 Changningers honored with Magnolia Gold Award for 2022

Three among the 10 expats honored with Shanghai’s Magnolia Gold Awards are from Changning.

Ashish Maskay, 51, is a 2020 Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award recipient. Having spent more than one-third of his life in the city, the Nepalese is famous in the expatriate and local communities partly for blood donation activities.

As a surgeon, Maskay knows the importance of blood in surgeries. Having long been involved in blood donation, he established a team of expatriate blood donation volunteers and launched Bloodline in 2016. It organizes blood donation events regularly in interesting ways and makes it a fashion lifestyle for international families in the city.

By gathering people of different nationalities and different cultural backgrounds together, Maskay wishes to make foreigners feel they are part of the city, instead of outsiders.

He gathered more than 200 foreigners via WeChat during the pandemic to donate blood and help the Shanghai Blood Center cope with the lack of blood.

Xiaoping Shen, 71, was born in Shanghai and went to the US for studies in the 1980s. He came back to join Shanghai Sipo Polytechnic and founded its nursing school, the first such private school in Shanghai, in 2003 and has developed an educational system in line with international standards. He won the Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award in 2008.

After 19 years, Sipo’s nursing school has become a demonstration site for health service education among all vocational schools in China.

More than half of its 10,000-plus graduates in the past 16 years have been recruited by top hospitals in China, boasting a 99 percent annual employment rate on average, much higher than the average rate among vocational schools in the country.

Shen has also been active in promoting international exchanges. The nursing school has hosted several international seminars on topics such as evidence-based nursing education and education of nursing combining medical treatment and elderly care.

Shen also initiated an alliance with seven other privately run nursing schools and promoted coordination in the Yangtze River Delta region to push the development of nursing schools in the region and the whole country.

Daquan Xu, 59, has been working in Shanghai for 17 years and won the Magnolia Silver Award in 2017.

Led by Xu, Bosch China increased its sales volume by five times between 2011 and 2021, with automobile and smart transport technology contributing 70 percent of the total.

Embracing China’s integrated development strategy in the Yangtze River Delta region, Bosch China completed construction of its innovation and software R&D center in Wuxi, neighboring Jiangsu Province, in 2020 and planned to open new branches in Shanghai.

Xu has been leading Bosch China in applying artificial intelligence in manufacturing to improve efficiency and save costs. Its team has helped improve speed and accuracy of polymerase chain reaction tests.

Bosch China is supporting China’s efforts in reaching carbon emission peak in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2060. In 2019 and 2020, it invested about 120 million yuan for carbon neutrality and its China headquarters became the first industrial enterprise to realize the target in 2020 and is sharing its experiences with other enterprises.

It now envisions to further reduce carbon emission by 15 percent and support China to reach carbon emission peak in 2028.

Xu also led Bosch China to establish a charity center in 2011, which has made 156 million yuan of donations and operated more than 230 charity programs. Its employees also offer more than 6,000 hours of voluntary services each year.

Changning District initiated Hongqiao Friendship Award in 2020 as the first district level external commendation. It also established Hongqiao Friendship Alliance as the first district level regular exchange platform for foreigners in Shanghai.

The alliance members put forward many valuable opinions and suggestions on the construction of Changning and Hongqiao International Open Hub from the perspectives of international cooperation, industrial development, business environment, talent service and urban development.

Last year, a total of six outstanding foreigners from Changning won the “Magnolia Silver Award.” 

 

 

Edited by Shanghai Daily