Russia’s students will be compelled to learn Chinese by the Kremlin, despite facing strong opposition.
Russian Government Faces Resistance to Mandate Chinese Language Study
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has faced “wild resistance” to a mandate that students at top universities study the Chinese language, a Kremlin adviser acknowledged, but it intends to forge ahead.
“There will be no violence, we will convince, but at the same time, we will move in this direction if we want to be competitive,” Kremlin science and technology adviser Andrei Fursenko said, per an unofficial translation of a state media report.
Russian students at at least one major university have condemned the mandate as “absurd and harmful,” but Fursenko maintained it is essential given China’s prominence in science and technology industries. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime, which has emerged as Putin’s most important international buttress, sees it as a way to “open up new horizons and promising prospects” for the two societies, in keeping with Xi’s agreement with Putin in the communique they released before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“They adopted a joint Chinese-Russian statement, which provided for strengthening cooperation in the area of education, boosting the quality and efficiency of education for Russian citizens in China and Chinese citizens in Russia, strengthening cooperation in the area of teaching languages, as well as developing bilateral exchanges between students from the two countries,” Ambassador Zhang Hanhui, the Chinese envoy to Russia, said last week.
Fursenko, speaking at a youth education forum, asserted that about 30% of scientific research texts are written in Chinese, according to RIA Novosti.
“Do we want to stay in the [scientific] trend? Let’s move on,” he said. “The problem is that, of course, it is necessary to ensure that the Russian language remains among several languages of science.”
That line of Kremlin reasoning overstates the significance of Chinese language sources in the field, according to a prominent Russian astrophysicist who sided with the disgruntled students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
“For basic sciences, there is only one valid language, English. And this will not change in the foreseeable future,” Dr. Sergei Popov said earlier this year. “One hundred percent of what I read and 90% of what I write is in English. The question of Chinese may arise, less frequently, in the areas of engineering or technical subjects.”
The unhappy students at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology argued in March that “the number of collaborations between our scientists and Chinese scientists has not reached a level that makes learning Chinese necessary,” as part of a backlash against a regulation that mandates four years of Chinese language instruction at the apparent expense of other European languages.
“It’s no secret that geopolitical changes are underway right now and that they affect our entire lives,” student council president Ilia Zakharov told Le Monde.
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