At a reception hosted by the Chinese embassy in Belgium last Friday, I was seated at a table with several Belgian couples whose children were scheduled to leave to study in China for a year. Those sitting at the table and I shared our travel experiences. A woman asked me what I thought of Haikou, capital of the island province of Hainan.

"The beaches in Sanya are nicer," I replied instinctively before regretting my answer.

It turned out that her son, a graduate student of China studies at KU Leuven, will attend Hainan University in Haikou and she is planning to visit him.

Some 30 Belgian students will go to China to study in the coming year with the help of the China Scholarship Council.

A Belgian student I met later that night said he chose Haikou because he is not like others who prefer big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

"I guess I just talked to your mom," I said.

"The one in green flowery shirt?" he asked, pointing to the table where I had been sitting earlier.

When I asked what he was looking forward to most during his upcoming first trip to China, he said he wanted to improve his language skills, as well as see firsthand how different China was from the one described in the West.

That's exactly what I expect from the students. Seeing, indeed, is believing: to see China firsthand in a more in-depth way by mingling with the Chinese people, to learn the language and history, to know about its culture and society, and to understand the great transformation China has undergone in the last 46 years since the launch of reform and opening-up, as well as to understand the challenges the country faces, and suggest the room for improvement for the country of over 1.4 billion people.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the intensifying global geopolitical tensions have affected the number of foreign students and foreign tourists studying, or planning to study, in China, but that is changing thanks partly to China's visa-free policy for many nationals of European countries.

Disinformation about China is rife in the West, mainly because of the US' reckless smear campaign against China. The European Union, on which the US has enormous influence, has been heavily impacted by the smear campaign.

Like most countries, China may not be a paradise. But it is certainly not hell as many Western media and politicians try to portray it to be. It is a big, populous, diverse and complex country that even Chinese people like me have much to discover.

Several KU Leuven graduates who are about to go to China are students of Prof Dorien Emmers, an economist whose experience of studying at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, more than a decade ago has had a huge impact on her career. She has become an expert on the Chinese economy and a strong advocate for studying in China.

This fact reminded me of a recent video on a social media platform by Christopher Green, the new US consul general in Wuhan, Hubei province. In the video, he has emphasized the importance of exchanges between the two peoples, the necessity for China and the US to learn from each other, and his strong interest in learning about Chinese history and culture.

Green's post is a breath of fresh air at a time when many other US diplomats are indulging in smear campaigns against China.

In late 2009, then US President Barack Obama launched the"100,000 Strong Initiative" to encourage US students to study in China, prompting students to study the Chinese language in US schools. However, the resurgence of McCarthyism in the US over the past few years has greatly dampened that zeal. Ignorance about China, as exhibited by some US politicians, has often been a trait of US society. That is also sadly becoming true in some European capitals.

The world faces many grave challenges, from conflicts to climate change, and these challenges can be dealt with effectively only by organizing more exchanges between the peoples and better understanding each other.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.

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