In cultural reversal, European royals turn to Chinese

For sure, European institutions are increasingly offering Chinese-language classes to young officials. On July 21, while I was walking with participants in the Belgian National Day parade, a retired Belgian stopped me to say that in his youth he studied Chinese in Taiwan for a few years and spent more than 10 years on the Chinese mainland. I was amazed at his fluent Chinese.

All these are proof of the trend of Chinese becoming popular across the world, partly because of the attractions of Chinese civilization and China's growing economic clout.

In recent years, China has initiated several projects to better connect with the rest of the world. One is the Belt and Road Initiative, which is aimed at improving connectivity in Eurasia through infrastructure construction, growing trade flow and increased people-to-people exchanges. The other is the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that offers funds to countries to improve connectivity among Asia, Europe and Africa.

China therefore needs to innovatively respond to this trend to spread its language and culture, in order to meet the rising demands in Europe and other continents.

Although China has already helped set up Confucius Institutes in many universities in countries across the world, and Chinese language and culture classes have become part of primary and secondary schools in many countries, more needs to be done to spread the real values of Chinese culture. It's time China intensified its cooperation with other countries to turn some of the schools into bilingual or trilingual institutions, where Chinese language and culture can be taught at least one day a week. Britain, the US, Canada, Japan, France and other countries have set up many schools in China with their own curriculum.

China can follow their examples to set up similar schools in other countries. And this should also be part of the mission for China's new Minister of Education Chen Baosheng.

The author is deputy chief of China Daily European Bureau

fujing@chinadaily.com.cn