A radical step across continents

Tekeste Sebhat Negga runs YAPS to help African graduates find jobs by hosting CV workshops. Provided to China Daily

Former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: "A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air."

He obviously never met anyone like Tsinghua University senior student and youth leader Tekeste Sebhat Negga, a man of action and ideals with one foot firmly planted in China and the other in his beloved Africa.

By the Chinese definition, Negga qualifies as an Ethiopian princeling. His father was a guerilla fighter for 17 years. The political party he founded is still in power.

Negga has had China on his mind as long as he can remember. "The first time that I heard of China was when I was very, very young," he recalls.

"My dad was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary so we had Mao books lying around and all 45 volumes of Lenin and a plethora of communist manifestos and socialist thinking. And that's how I first heard of China, from my dad talking about it at home.

"Later on, I wanted to do something different. From Addis (Ababa, Ethiopia's capital), I could see where Chinese-African and Chinese-Ethiopian relations were going, and I wanted to situate myself strategically between China and Africa."

Negga was accepted by universities all over the world and chose Tsinghua. The electrical engineering and automation major did not confine himself to his classes.

In 2009, Negga became the co-founder and president of Young African Professionals and Students, China's only pan-African youth organization.

"Our premise was that there was a good and robust dialogue going on up there on the political and diplomatic level with our leaders, but when you go down to the grassroots, there wasn't anything," Negga says. "And you need the youth, the people, the society to perpetuate any sort of relationship that we have."