In an effort to broaden the horizons of its students and the larger Rhode Island community, the University of Rhode Island has partnered with the Chinese government to open a Confucius Institute this fall, on the Kingston campus, that will be the second in the state.
The news comes just over four months after Bryant University, which opened a U.S.-China Institute in 2005, announced the creation of its own Confucius Institute with $100,000 of seed money and a wealth of educational materials from China.
Both institutes are part of a project managed by the People’s Republic of China’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. Their goal is to promote “friendly relationships with other countries” and to enhance the knowledge of the Chinese language and culture among “world Chinese learners.”
Like Bryant, URI will receive $100,000 for its Confucius Institute from Hanban, a teaching office run by the Chinese government, to support programs related to Chinese language and culture. Hanban will also provide funding for two Chinese language instructors for five years, add 5,000 books, compact discs and DVDs to URI’s library and supply multimedia courseware, teaching materials and online courses to the university.
The institute at URI will also help develop collaborative research projects through the U.S.-China Center for Research in Visual Information, Visual Literacy and Global News Media.
Though the deal was only announced last month, it was actually signed in January by URI President Robert L. Carothers and Xu Lin, director of the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. And it’s not the beginning of URI’s link to China.
The university has offered Chinese language classes since 2004, in response to a petition by students the previous year. Also in 2004, Yan Ma, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies and now director of the Confucius Institute at URI, created a link between URI and her alma matter, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
Now, through URI’s International Engineering Program, in which students earn dual degrees in a foreign language and engineering, several students are preparing to take internships in China. And last summer, 14 students from the engineering, business and library studies programs spent seven weeks in China on a study tour.
The trip led to plans for the College of Business Administration to set up an International Business Program, mirrored after the engineering program’s model, and for URI to launch the first program in North America to teach librarians and information professionals how to “provide services related to China and Chinese studies.”
Ma will also be leading a three-credit course in Chinese librarianship and taking students, from URI and elsewhere, to China for two weeks this summer.
“They will see how the systems are different, and when they receive Chinese language and culture courses, it will prepare them to serve in different information settings to provide Chinese services,” Ma said. “There is a strong demand for those services, and it will also give them more life experience.”
Because of the work already being done with China, Ma said she believes that the institute was the next logical step for URI.
“We needed a Confucius Institute for the university,” she said. “This will serve as a timely platform for the university for all of the China programs that are already going on at the university. And this is what we need, because this will be open to the public.”
While the internships are specifically for URI students, many of the institute’s resources will be available to outsiders as well. This includes the Hanban Chinese Language Center, to train teachers to teach Chinese; Chinese culture workshops; a Chinese film week; Chinese awareness courses, and Chinese art exhibits and performances. The institute will also have offices in both Kingston and Providence to offer its services to the public.
In addition, the theme for URI’s honors colloquium for next fall, which is both a course and a series of public lectures, will be “China Rising.”
“What most Americans know about China comes from the labels on the clothes and other goods they purchase from China, a market now exceeding $200 billion a year,” Carothers said in a news release. “Yet for many Americans, the real China remains a mystery. As China grows and prospers, it will become the United States’ chief competitor for resources.
“The reality is that what we don’t know can hurt us, especially in this complex relationship,” he added. “To make that relationship work, we need to appreciate and understand each other, learning how to work together for our mutual benefit. The Confucius Institute will help us achieve that goal.”
Bryant’s Confucius Institute is managed by the university’s U.S.-China Institute, which also supports executive training for local businesses on China-related business issues and encourages closer ties between regional businesses and their counterparts in China.
When Bryant announced the creation of its Confucius Institute last November, it cited estimates by the People’s Republic of China that by 2010, there will be about 100 million people worldwide learning Chinese as a foreign language.
There is also a Confucius Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Hanban has said it wants to establish more than 100 such institutes worldwide by 2010.
