"In recent years, overseas students from Thailand, Vietnam and other ASEAN countries come to
learn Chinese in Kunming one after another, they mainly learn Chinese culture and how to master Chinese. "Yang Liquan, director of the Chinese Department of Yunnan University, told reporters.
It is known that since China joined the WTO, Yunnan has become a place where ASEAN students wanted to go in the past five years. Zhang Shaohong, deputy director of the Foreign Cooperation and Exchange Department of the Provincial Education Department, said that 30 of the province's 52 ordinary institutions of higher education have enrolled ASEAN students. Over 60% of the more than 4,500 foreign students enrolled in the province's universities are from ASEAN countries.
Yunnan Normal University has been recruiting ASEAN students since the early 1990s, and has more than 1,500 students so far. Yunnan University of Finance and Economics began to recruit Southeast Asian students in 1999. At present, more than 130 students from Southeast Asia are in school. Since 2005, Yunnan College of Traditional Chinese Medicine has recruited more than 100 Thai students and Honghe College has also recruited more than 100 Vietnamese students.
In the past five years since China's joined the WTO, the Chinese language craze has gone from sparkling to blazing, and teachers of Chinese as a foreign language are in short supply. In 2002, the Chinese Department of Yunnan University recruited the first batch of students majoring in Chinese as a foreign language. When graduating, some of them took part in the overseas assignment of Chinese volunteers and some of them continued their postgraduate studies. The overall employment situation was better than that of the traditional Chinese language and literature students. The second batch of students will graduate next year.
In the future, in addition to ASEAN countries, Yunnan University will also introduce students majoring in Chinese as a foreign language to Europe and the United States and other developed countries to engage in Chinese education.
