Delegates from China and across the United States converged at Stanford this week to attend FACES’s 2010 conference on U.S.-China relations, entitled “On Common Ground.”

The five-day event features experts on U.S.-China relations from across the country, including Hoover Institution fellows and a former director of the World Bank.

FACES, which stands for “Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford,” is a student-led organization whose mission is to “improve the future of U.S.-China relations by fostering personal relationships and understanding among future leaders in the United States and China,” wrote Liliana Chan-Hou ’11, the FACES vice president of development, in an e-mail to The Daily.

The organization was founded in 2001 and has hosted a total of eight conferences to date.

At this year’s FACES conference there are 20 Chinese delegates hailing from universities located in Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, Remin and Zhejiangm, according to Kimberly Cheng ’10, the FACES vice president of marketing. Another 20 are from top American colleges, including Cornell, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill and UC-Berkeley.

While many of the conference attendees have backgrounds in international relations, the conference organizers tried to select delegates with different backgrounds, such as engineering and history, to incorporate different points of view into the discussion, Cheng said.

Many members of FACES are of Chinese descent, but the conference also welcomes a large number of non-Chinese attendees who are interested in China and U.S.-China relations.

According to Sherry Wang ’13, a member of the FACES programming committee for this conference, attendees will discuss topics ranging from dating and sex in China to the debate over nuclear weapons.

“We try to give students in the U.S. and China a chance to exchange ideas, talk about U.S.-China relations and connect to each other,” Wang said. “This is so that when they become future leaders, they will have perspectives from different groups of people.”

Despite the sensitive nature of political discussion in China, Cheng said FACES does not censor or avoid any controversial topic, pointing to a seminar in last year’s conference discussing Tibet, one of the most heated issues in U.S.-China relations.

“The Chinese delegates come to Stanford knowing full well that we talk openly about issues on U.S.-China relations and it’s very much uncensored,” Cheng said. “We don’t shy away from controversial topics at all.”

The conference continues through Thursday, April 15.