2006年10月2日，中央文明办、国家旅游局今天联合颁布《中国公民出境旅游文明行为指南》、《中国公民国内旅游文明行为公约》。以下为全文：

《中国公民出境旅游文明行为指南》

• 中国公民，出境旅游，注重礼仪，保持尊严。
• 讲究卫生，爱护环境；衣着得体，请勿喧哗。
• 尊老爱幼，助人为乐；女士优先，礼貌谦让。
• 出行办事，遵守时间；排队有序，不越黄线。
• 文明住宿，不损用品；安静用餐，请勿浪费。
• 健康娱乐，有益身心；赌博色情，坚决拒绝。
• 参观游览，遵守规定；习俗禁忌，切勿冒犯。
• 遇有疑难，咨询领馆；文明出行，一路平安。

《中国公民国内旅游文明行为公约》

营造文明、和谐的旅游环境，关系到每位游客的切身利益。做文明游客是我们大家的义务，请遵守以下公约：

• 维护环境卫生。 不随地吐痰和口香糖，不乱扔废弃物，不在禁烟场所吸烟。
• 遵守公共秩序。不喧哗吵闹，排队遵守秩序，不并行挡道，不在公众场所高声交谈。
• 保护生态环境。不踩踏绿地，不摘折花木和果　实，不追捉、投打、乱喂动物。
• 保护文物古迹。不在文物古迹上涂刻，不攀爬触摸文物，拍照摄像遵守规定。
• 爱惜公共设施。不污损客房用品，不损坏公用设施，不贪占小便宜，节约用水用电，用餐不浪费。
• 尊重别人权利。不强行和外宾合影，不对着别人打喷嚏，不长期占用公共设施，尊重服务人员的劳动，尊重各民族宗教习俗。
• 讲究以礼待人。衣着整洁得体，不在公共场所袒胸赤膊；礼让老幼病残，礼让女士；不讲粗话。
• 提倡健康娱乐。抵制封建迷信活动，拒绝黄、赌、毒。

China is trying to do more in education export. Annouonced by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) on May 29th that China is to become the “most attractive destination” in the Asia-Pacific region for overseas students.

Statistics from the CSC show the number of foreigners studying in China hit 140,000 in 2005, including 40,000 from the Republic of Korea, 14,000 from Japan, and 8,000 from the United States. The total had risen by 32 percent from the figure of 1998.

Student exchages is seen as one of the most effective ways for educational impact which usually leads to higher intercutural awareness of the participants. Attracting more international students into one country not only helps to build mutual cultural understandings among young people, it also has significant economic implications. Higher Education export earnings are worth about £3.6 billion in UK out of its total worth of £45 of higher education institutions, and education is the fourth largest export industry in Australia in 2004.

Over the years, China has benefitted from sending students and researchers abroad. Undoubtedly it has contributed to its current economic growth and development. Therefore, China is going to fund more, despite the number of self-supporting students going abroad is ever increasing with the rising-up of the general living standards.

Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of Chinese language in recent years and a maturing service environment for foreign students has in fact lent more confidence to the country for making it a most attractive destination for education in the Asian and Pacific ragion.

To promote, practical enough and before other things, as an international student, you can get some cultural experiences at a discount.

In October 2005, Mckinsey (MGI) published a report entitled Addressing China’s Looming Talent Shortage, which pointed out that

“Despite China’s enormous pool of university graduates (3.1 million in 2005 alone), MGI research suggests that fewer than 10 percent of Chinese job candidates, on average, would be suitable for work in a foreign company, and the fast-growing domestic economy absorbs most of those who could.”

Addressing the same issue, the post entitled Bridging the ‘talent gap’ with training on this blog also gives analysis on the culture gaps in some areas between domestic Chinese companies and multinational companies and stresses the need for Chinese graduates to be more intercultually competitive.

The term of intercultural competence is expressed as international understanding, or global awareness in most cases in China. With repect to talent development, it is often referred to as talent globalization. In 2005, when ChinaHR, one of the biggest internet job hunting and recruitment websites in China, and Monster, one of the biggest internet job search engines on the web, launched their partnership, a semniar entitled Conference on China Talent Globalization 2005 Beijing was held to mark of the start. The theme was, as a matter of fact, the intercultural competance of talents!

The word ‘culture’ has a broad and vague meaning in Chinese language. So as ‘intercultural’. Intercultural is still a ‘new word’ in the language and a new concept in some sense. Currently, it only appears in some specialized academic subjects of media and communications, and related subjects like language studies. In daily life and daily readings, the concept is expressed with international/global understanding/awareness.

Since China’s opening-up more than 25 years ago, people have gradually realized the importance of intercultural/international competence. It is both the cause and outcome of the necessity for communications with the outside world. And, it also represnents the practical individual needs to pursue better jobs.

In the past few years, as the result of the dramatic enrollment expansion in late 90′s, universities and collages are producing more graduates, taking the competition of the job market up to a new level. Meanwhile, as reported, more international talents are coming into the country. By the statistic of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security that the number of expatriates working in China has doubled to 150,000 in the last three years. The reason for the increase, according to Bridging the ‘talent gap’ with training, is due to the inability of the educational system to produce enough suitable talents.

Graduates lack of intercultural competence has been a longstanding issue in China. Interestingly, although it appeared that people both inside and outside the educational system know about the question and measures were taken, it is obvious that more reform measures in education need to be taken to “produce not just more graduates but more suitable ones” (by MGI report), more suitable ones with intercutural/international awareness and competence.

Intercultural/international competence, as personal ability, is important for every individual graduate. And, as Mckinsey suggested, it is also important for China “to avoid this talent crunch and to sustain the economic ascent of the past 20 years”, and “reforms in the educational system – including greater emphasis on practical and language skills – will help the country fill its skilled-labor gap.” (Mckinsey, Addressing China’s Looming Talent Shortage)

People whose native language is alphabetical often find Chinese language difficult to learn. As far as I can understand, it is because in Chinese language, the pronunciation, writing/spelling and meaning of the word are ‘separated’. In other words, not like the alphabetical languages, speaking (pronunciation) in Chinese language does little help to the writing (spelling), and in most cases the meaning of a character has little to do with its pronunciation and with how it is written.In speaking, the four tones can be tricky. Words with the same vowels and consonants but with a different tone can mean totally different things, which may make one feel nervous to speak. There are characters that have exactly the same pronunciation but means different things.

Most phrases are two-characters phrases, and phrases carries a meaning that is far profound than the simple plus of the meanings of the two characters.

Some say that to learn this language means you have to ‘hard-code’ the tonal pronunciation, the pictorial written form and sometimes confusing meaning of every character into one’s mind, memorize them and link them together. I think it is right to say that basically it is a language relying heavily on memorization.

And, this interesting website might help to get to know more about all these things: Learn Chinese Characters.

Then, how many characters you need to memorize? How many in total in this language? Here is a recent research report.

Chinese is not difficult to learn, for people could understand 90 percent of the content in Chinese publications, so long as they learn only about 900 Chinese characters and 11,000 phrases, a new survey shows.

Though 1.65 million words are found in use in the files, only 110,000, or seven percent, are frequently used. The rest are mainly names of people, places and organizations, according to the survey made by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission on the current situation of Chinese language.

The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9 million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the Internet.

“That means Chinese is not that difficult to learn,” said Li Yuming, director of the language information administration department of the Ministry of Education.

The survey report, the first of its kind issued in China, also shows that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the past, now appear more often in publications.

Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing 7,000-character table of the standard Chinese that were made nearly 20 years ago.

 

Among the words used on Internet, more than 55 percent are symbols or letters, exceeding Chinese characters, according to the survey.

The survey also shows that many of the 100 languages used by various ethnic minorities of China are at the brink of extinction.Because of rapid social development and the emergence of new media formats, such as the Internet, the Chinese language is witnessing a fast development, maybe faster than it has ever had, Li said.

Obviously, the current character table has lagged behind the development, and the ministry is drafting a new one, Li said, adding that the research may serve as an important reference to the revision. (Source:Frequently used Chinese characters decreasing)

I found this piece of report very interesting. And I hope it will help to build confidence for people who want to learn the language. We have touched upon the major ‘issues’ in learning the language, and I think once got over with these things, one will find that it is a language that is actually not as difficult as it is thought to be. One will find less confusing and there are rules and patterns to follow, the grammar is easy to master, and there are actually not that many characters needed to be memorized…

Beijing April 11, 2006: An intercultural seminar was held by AFS Intercultural Programs On April 11th at Jianguo Garden Hotel in Beijing, China to welcome AFS President Tachi Cazal’s visit. More than 50 people including professionals and experts in the intercultural realm, AFS returnees and volunteers and expatriates, and teachers and students interested in intercultural learning attended the seminar and participated in the discussions on the educational impact of international exchange on high school students.

Speakers included AFS President Tachi Cazal, an AFS alumnus from Paraguay to the USA; Professor Wayne L. Edwards, former AFS Chairman of the Board of Trustees who is presently the head School of Educational Studies of Massey University in New Zealand; and Mr. Edward W. Smith, the director of Beijing Consulting Group in Beijing and an AFS alumnus from Australia to China. Opening addresses were given by Mr. Cao Wenchun, Deputy Director of Oriental Comprehensive Research Institute on Public Administration of Development of Development Research Center of State Council and Mr. Anthony Tong, an AFS Hong Kong SAR (HKSAR) board member and the former Deputy Secretary of Education of HKSAR. Special guest Ms Chen Xuefeng, UNICEF education officer in Beijing also attended the event. Intercultural competence and international understanding are seen as abilities of growing importance for individuals and organizations in the process of globalization. Empirical research shows that intercultural competence can be better cultivated among children around the ages of 14 to 19. AFS Intercultural Programs, the leader of intercultural learning and exchange in the world, is devoted to creating more such opportunities for children and young adults to increase their abilities of intercultural communication and international understanding so that they might come back to make contributions to the social harmony and development of their own country. AFS has operated programs in China in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, implementing these with China Education Association for International Exchange and others in China for more than twenty years. AFS plans to expand its program offerings and increase participant volume significantly in next three years.

Independent third-party research has proven that as an educational process, AFS intercultural programs offerings help participants open their eyes to the world and cultivate abilities for interactions with different cultures. AFS program participants also develop a realistic knowledge of their host culture, significantly improve their language abilities, and raise their overall intercultural competence particularly in independent problem-solving and general social interaction. Studies have also demonstrated that through intercultural exchange, the cultural and national identities of the participants are in fact strengthened, while at the same time, more realistic, confident and tolerant attitudes towards differences in and outside of the home culture are formed.

AFS Intercultural Programs, as the world’s leading non-profit and volunteer-driven organization in intercultural learning and exchange, dedicates itself to build a more just and peaceful world through intercultural exchanges. Through the years, AFS has developed an efficient and trustable world-wide system combining the professional expertise of staff facilitators and a well-trained volunteer support base to reinforce the intercultural experience and to provide young participants with safe and valuable intercultural involvement opportunities.

Source: News Release by AFS International