Russia should expand studying Chinese and other Asian languages, given the continent’s growth in importance to world affairs, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.
“Given the pace of development of Asian countries, the center of economic and political life will gradually shift to these regions,” Putin told a group of 30 high-achieving students at an event in Moscow marking the start of a new academic year, calling it “an absolutely objective, inevitable process.”
With that in mind, he added, it would be good for Russian students to learn Chinese and other Asian languages, while not neglecting “other vectors of interaction” with the world.
Setting that up will not be a quick process, the president cautioned, as it requires both funding and qualified teachers.
“But we will do this, relying on foundations built in the past, because Oriental studies in the Soviet Union and now in Russia have always been at a high level, as all our colleagues working in this field…