Russian universities may start mass teaching of Chinese to make Russia more "competitive"

The Chinese language will be included in the curriculum of the Russian universities.

Source: Andrey Fursenko, advisor to Russian President for science and education

Fursenko stated that this step will be taken to grant the students access to scientific literature.

"Do we want to stay in trend? Let’s keep moving…if we want to be competitive", – he said.

He explained that at the moment 30% of the world's scientific literature is published in Chinese.

Background:

This is not the first attempt to make Russians learn Chinese.

In March, the employees of the Bank of Russia were also forced to learn Chinese.

Then, it was explained by the necessity of facilitating the professional interaction of their employees with their colleagues from Beijing.

Earlier, Chinese was introduced as the second mandatory foreign language in the leading Russian university – the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI). The administration of MFTI replaced the learning of Spanish, French and German with Chinese in the 2023-24 academic year.

Yet after mass protests of students who were ready to boycott the university, MFTI decided to give up this "timely and prospective" initiative.

Meanwhile, the survey of the Otkrytie bank dedicated to the Chinese Language Day on 20 April has shown that during the last two years, the number of those who consider Chinese the most crucial foreign language has increased three times, up to 16%. It turned out to be most demanded in the regions of Russia that are geographically close to China.

The State Duma of Russia called to include Chinese in the mandatory school curriculum.

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