On 20 May, Mr. Ding Rui, General Manager of Oxford University Press in China, and his colleagues visited FLTRP and had a meeting with Mr. Xu Jianzhong, Editor-in-Chief, Ms. Zhang Siying, Deputy Editor-in-Chief and heads of relevant departments. Both sides agreed that as the world’s and China's largest university press respectively, OUP and FLTRP should work closely to further strengthen and expand the existing cooperation, and actively build an all-around partnership.

Mr. Xu Jianzhong made a welcome speech, saying that OUP is the first reputable international publisher that FLTRP has received since the outbreak of the COVID-19. The cooperation between FLTRP and OUP owns a long history which can be traced back to 1983 when they signed the license agreement of Practical English Usage and Oxford Elementary Learner’s Dictionary of English, being the first licensed program of FLTRP with overseas company. Over the past 37 years, the cooperation between FLTRP and OUP has extended to the fields of readers, picture books, dictionaries, academics, coursebooks, etc. The successful products under this cooperation are  series of "Bookworms", "Lisheng", "Very Short Introduction", to name just a few. These classic works are yielded not only based on long time mutual trust, but also on the publishing strength of both sides. The new project, New Future College English jointly created by the two sides will be published gradually since this year. It is believed that this project will become a new milestone of the cooperation in the near future which will also promote the cooperation in academic, teacher`s training and other business.

Mr. Xu then introduced the development of FLTRP in recent two years, especially the digital strategy. He pointed out that FLTRP has actively responded to the challenges and opportunities brought by educational informationization and will make continuous efforts to promote digitalization. FLTRP looks forward to expanding digital cooperation with OUP to provide a platform for a more comprehensive cooperation.

Mr. Ding Rui emphasized that OUP attaches great importance to the cooperation and relationship with FLTRP and regards FLTRP as the most important publishing partner of OUP in the Chinese market. FLTRP possesses a deep understanding of China's foreign language education market with strong marketing ability. Meanwhile, OUP owns abundant and high-quality content. Very promising achievements will be made if FLTRP and OUP combine their advantages. OUP hopes to work closely with FLTRP to provide more high-quality and suitable learning products for Chinese learners through co-publishing and other forms. Mr. Ding also said that the COVID-19 highlighted the importance of digital publishing and online education. OUP is willing to reinforce digital cooperation with FLTRP to make the partnership more comprehensive.