Educational exchanges establish ‘rich harmony’

The more than 170,000 students and scholars from China studying in the United Kingdom make up the largest Chinese student community in Europe. Meanwhile, the number of British students traveling to China has risen to nearly 10,000.

Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the UK, equates China-UK educational exchanges and cooperation to a symphony, saying there are “flourishing exchanges happening on all fronts”, but that the “main theme” is loud and clear.

For example, when the Oxford Institute of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences was established at the University of Oxford last year it became the first research unit set up by a foreign university at Oxford in the university’s 800-year history.

In the meantime, the Peking University HSBC Business School opened a new campus in the UK, a move seen as a pioneering effort by a Chinese university to run a school in a developed country.

There are also 47 Confucius Institutes and 156 Confucius Classrooms in the UK, with more than 160,000 registered students learning Mandarin.

More than 600 British primary and secondary schools offer Mandarin courses, making Chinese the second-most-popular foreign language taught at UK schools.

The establishment of joint scientific research centers by universities of the two countries has advanced cooperation.

Also, for the first time, publisher HarperCollins has translated and published Chinese math textbooks for use in British primary and secondary schools. More than 500 math teachers from the two countries have been on exchange visits through a China-UK exchange program. Liu said the “symphony” of exchange and cooperation established a “rich harmony” for mutual learning of language and culture.