Learn Chinese and promote the publishing industry

Beijing (CNS) -- "Chinese is going to develop into one of the two world languages… Chinese will become a language every educated person will want to speak," said Professor Michael Hoey, vice-president of the University of Liverpool, at the London Book Fair.

The three-day fair held in London's Earls Court Exhibition Center from April 15 to April 18 had China as its market focus this year.

Learning Chinese continues to be a hot trend in the world. To satisfy the high demand, Hanban, China's official language promotion agency, has for the first time launched a series of language learning materials and cultural publications for global readers, including New Concept of Chinese and Chinese Masters.

Copyright transfers for Chinese language learning materials are the highlight of the book fair. Many international publishing companies are keenly interested, and have signed agreements for the rights with Chinese publishing companies.

In fact the lion's share of all the copyright transfers completed at the fair were for educational materials in Chinese language and culture, said Ma Jianfei, deputy director of Hanban, referring to their admittedly incomplete statistics. In any case, products for the promotion of language learning alone relate to over 60 percent of all China's copyright exports.

Foreigners learning Chinese essentially have to have a dialogue with Eastern culture, said Haban director Xu Lin, and he expects to see more such cultural exchanges.