From November 14 to 16, nearly 5,000 Chinese and foreign guests, along with representatives of over 100 universities and companies, gathered in Beijing for the 2025 World Chinese Language Conference.

The Chinese language has now been incorporated into the national education systems of 86 countries, with over 200 million individuals studying it now abroad. The "Chinese bridge" contests, which test foreigners' proficiency in the language, have attracted over 1.8 million young participants from more than 160 countries and regions.

HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test) is organized by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation under China's Ministry of Education. It has established 1,477 test centers across 168 countries over the past 35 years. The total number of test-takers is expected to exceed 8.5 million this year, with young adults aged 19 to 45 accounting for nearly 60 percent of new candidates.

The "Chinese Tea–When People Meet Nature" (中国茶—人居草木间) Tea Culture Exhibition of the 2025 World Chinese Language Conference

[Photo by Wei Guanyu from Xinhua News Agency]

To cope with the ever-evolving vocabulary required for foreign learners, the newly updated HSK textbooks, released on November 15, now include topics, words and phrases reflecting Chinese culture and contemporary developments, such as those concerning high-speed railways, QR code-scanning, food delivery, and live-streamers.

At the conference's parallel sessions, participants shared stories of how learning Chinese has changed their lives. In Kenya, the Confucius Institute at Egerton University has adapted to the local conditions by offering training programs of agricultural techniques. Specifically, the grafting technique for a tomato variety that is "small yet tasty" has helped achieve the goal of increasing incomes in China-Africa agricultural development and poverty reduction demonstration villages. Meanwhile, Yuanzhongwen (元中文, an organization) is using a vertical large-scale model to revitalize dormant language data, assisting 100,000 employees at Tsingshan Industrial Park in Indonesia in acquiring the Chinese-language knowledge in the steel industry, thereby helping relevant companies reduce costs and improve efficiency.

China, with the Chinese language as its official language, is expected to offer more high-quality public resources for international Chinese education. On November 14, several new digital tools were unveiled, including the Knowledge Graph for International Chinese Language Education, the International Chinese Education Corpus, and an adaptive learning assessment platform named "HSK GO". These tools have converted extensive Chinese-language knowledge into interconnected entity nodes and organized them into a searchable data engine, supporting global cooperative institutions in collaborative development and resource sharing.

(Source: Xinhua News Agency)