A notebook in hand, Mary Lepneva wrote down all the Chinese
phrases that were new to her, while working as a volunteer for the
Fourth China-Russia Women's Cultural Week.
The student of the Moscow State Institute of International
Relations will come to Beijing this August for the Chinese-speaking
contest to be held by the Chinese Language Council of the Ministry
of Education. She has a good chance of winning with her perfect
pronunciation, which she has achieved by making a lot of Chinese
friends in Moscow.
Many Russian students are
coming to China to sharpen their Chinese language skills for better
jobs back home.
Learning Chinese is becoming popular in Russia
owing to a growing need for people with the language skills and
offers of good salaries, says a student of Moscow University who
was also a volunteer and prefers to be known by his Chinese name,
Mo Andong.
Graduates who can speak Chinese find jobs easily at Russian
companies, government departments and also at subsidiaries of
multi-nationals in Russia, and receive a much higher than average
payment. "The Chinese language is a very good major, indeed," he
says.
Many young people in Russia are going in for a short study stint
in China to polish their language skills, he says. Mo himself
stayed in Beijing for one year, and Lepneva is going to study at
the Beijing Foreign Language University in 2009. She is also
applying to be a volunteer at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
Anna and her boyfriend, both college students and volunteers at
the Culture Week, also plan to study the language in China and have
been admitted to Guangzhou University. "China is being talked about
all the time here and people want to know more about China. So do
we," she says.
The theme of the Cultural Week, and also the Year of China in
Russia, is to give Russians a better knowledge and understanding of
their neighbor.
During the week from July 2 to 8, Gu Xiulian, vice-chairwoman of
the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and
president of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), led a Chinese
delegation to Moscow and St Petersburg and met senior Russian
officials such as Boris Gryzlov, chairman of the state Duma, lower
house of Russia's parliament and First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri
Medvedev, as well as her Russian counterpart Svetlana Orlova.
One of the highlights of the celebrations was a song-and-dance
show by typical families from both China and Russia. Other events
included a forum involving Chinese and Russian women, the second of
its kind, and an exhibition of folk handicrafts.
At the forum, women of the two countries exchanged views on
topics such as marriage, family, education of the youth and life of
the elderly. "Both sides highly value the actions of Chinese and
Russian women's non-governmental organizations in the strengthening
of families, promotion of sexual equality and social security,"
says an agreement reached at the forum, which was read at the
Culture Week's closing ceremony by Orlova and ACWF's vice-president
Zhao Shaohua.
The agreement also condemns all violence targeting children and
women as well as sexual discrimination, and calls for even better
communication between the two countries' parliaments, youth, women
and non-governmental organizations.
(China Daily July 18, 2007)
