China's Ministry of Education has recently again demanded that from now on Chinese must be offered to all college students as a compulsory course.

 

 

Students attend a class in a college in southwest China's Yunnan Province in this undated photo.

 

The new move is believed to be a make up for the long lack of a compulsory course on Chinese language and literature, or simply called Chinese, or Chinese language, in China's universities and colleges.

 

According to Beijing Morning Post reports, many top universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University have all begun to list Chinese among their compulsory curriculum for all students.

 

Chinese was an optional lesson for most college students majored in science or technology in the past. But English, a foreign language, was required for all. A college Chinese language and literature teacher had to admit reluctantly that Chinese was overwhelmed by English.

 

In a meeting held in south China's Hunan Province at the end of last year, the Ministry of Education requested all colleges to include Chinese in their compulsory curriculum, aiming to rejuvenate the teaching of Chinese language and literature.

 

Many top universities highly hail the new demand.

 

"Students who don't pass the English language test can't get a degree. Now the same happens to Chinese!" an education administration official from Peking University told a journalist with Beijing Morning Post.

 

Peking University has introduced a "general curriculum for quality education". It requires all students must pick one to two classes related to Chinese language, many of which are given by reputed teachers.

 

Other colleges have also followed suit and added Chinese language and literature into their compulsory curriculum for students.

 

"Chinese language and literature classes are quite necessary for us students of science and technology," said Wang Xiaohu, a freshman majored in electrics in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, "it's beneficial for our cultural cultivation."

 

(CRI May 10, 2007)