China Daily USA – HUA SHENGDUN
“When the Chinese president and the Harvard president met in Beijing this week and called for deeper understanding through cultural and educational exchanges, it resonated with a Chinese language group for American college students in Washington. The Chinese tea time, a regular event for Mandarin speaking and bicultural sharing, kicked off this semester at the George Washington University Sigur Center for Asian Studies on Tuesday afternoon. Daniel Reinemann, a senior majoring in international relations at GWU, went to Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an as an exchange student in the fall of 2014…”An interesting experience,” Reinemann said in Mandarin. He has studied Chinese for three years as his minor. “A lot of people learn Chinese for practical reasons, but I think the cultural aspects are also important and attractive,” he said. Mark Jarvis, who graduated from GWU more than 20 years ago, returned to the school’s Confucius Institute to further his study in China after retirement. “I used to do some business in Asia and went to Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong very often,” Jarvis said. “It’s very useful.”…Both Reinenmann and Jarvis are among the growing number of American students who have taken to the Chinese language and culture in the past decade, particularly after US President Barack Obama announced in Shanghai in 2009 a goal of sending 100,000 American students to study in China from 2010 to 2014.”(more)