Purpose
The proliferation of Confucius Institutes around the world has multiple purposes: the promotion and teaching of Chinese culture and language abroad, the encouraging of trade ties, and the extension of the Chinese Party-State's campaign of "soft power" into the educational sphere in foreign countries.
CIs develop Chinese language courses, train teachers, hold the HSK Examination (Chinese proficiency test), and provide information about contemporary China. The director of the CI program, Xu Lin, says CIs were started to cater to the sudden uptick in interest in Chinese language around the world; they also provide Chinese language teaching staff from the Mainland. As of 2011 there were 200 such teachers working in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Confucius Institute
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“Whoever considers morality the main objective of human existence, seems to me like a person who defines the purpose of a clock as not going wrong. The first objective for a clock, is, however, that it does run; not going wrong is an additional regulative function. If not a watch’s greatest accomplishment were not going wrong, unwound watches might be the best.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Rule of religion: purpose breathes even in dirt and stones.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)