Australia’s Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has helped spark a renaissance in the study of Asian languages, with record numbers of students signing up for Chinese, a major university said on Friday.
“There has been a significant increase in students wanting to study Mandarin, probably reflecting that we have a prime minister that speaks Chinese,” Australian National University’s (ANU) Kent Anderson said.
“But across the board Asian languages are proving popular with students which fits in nicely with the government’s languages program,” the head of the university’s Asian Studies faculty said in a statement.
There was a 23 percent increase overall in the number of Asian studies applicants for this year at the university, with growing demand for classes in Japanese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese, he added.
Rudd, who became prime minister little more than a year ago, quickly put in place a A$62 million (US$44 million) Asian languages program for high schools.
By 2020 the program aims to have 12 percent of graduates fluent in either Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean.
“This is the Asia century, our No. 1 trade partner is China and our No. 1 export partner is Japan,” Anderson said. “It’s in our economic interests, it’s in our security interests to make that kind of investment.”
Rudd studied at the ANU in the 1970s, majoring in Chinese language and history before continuing his studies in Taiwan and going on to become a diplomat appointed to Beijing.
His fluent Mandarin — a unique skill among Western world leaders — has charmed Chinese from President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) to Beijing university students and impressed his countrymen since he came to power.
“The growing economy [of China] and the profile given to it by having the prime minister speak Chinese has an impact on the kind of people who are seeing the economic opportunities in China and other regional economies,” Anderson said.
But he expressed concern about a decline in Indonesian studies, which began after the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
With Indonesia being Australia’s closest neighbor it was critical to educate a new generation about the country, but government security warnings against travel there deterred students from in-country study, Anderson said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS