Kungfu lovers perform martial art at a square during an activity held by Palacky University in Prague of Czech on Sept 24, 2014, to celebrate the Day of the Confucius Institute which falls on Sept 27. (Photo/Xinhua)
The Dutch seem pleased with a recent announcement that King Willem-Alexander's daughter Amalia, the 13-year-old heir to the throne, will learn Chinese during the upcoming school semester. Some have even called it the royal family's "smartest investment" given the deepening relationship between China and the Netherlands.
The Dutch royalty is not alone in embracing the Chinese language. In neighboring Belgium, Princess Elisabeth, the first child of King Philippe born in 2001, was already studying Chinese in a Dutch-medium school in Brussels. When King Philippe acceded to the throne in 2013, the princess became the duchess of Brabant, a title reserved for the heir apparent, which means she could become a Chinese-speaking queen of a European country.
In fact, the older generations of royal families in Europe have had an interest in Chinese culture for long. Although Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, who celebrated her 90th birthday this year, doesn't speak Chinese, she has enormous interest in Chinese philosophy, especially Taoism.
This month, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, partly supported by Britain's Royal Family, established the Academy of Sinology with the aim of encouraging doctorate students to study ancient Chinese religions, texts, language and history.
The Danish monarchy, too, has shown keen interest in Chinese language and culture. Apart from Danish, French and English, the royal family's website has been using Chinese since 2014. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and King Philippe of Belgium have already visited China after Xi Jinping became China's top leader. And in return, Xi has visited the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain.
Studying Chinese is becoming popular across Europe. When I was interviewing parliamentarians in Greece during the country's sovereign debt crisis, one of them even arranged for his 16-year-old daughter, who was learning Chinese at the time, to be present during our conversation.
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 Fu Jing is deputy chief of China Daily European Bureau
