This Day, That Year

Item from April 18, 1988, in China Daily: Chen Lin (center), a professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, speaks at the official reopening of the Beijing English Corner in the city's western Purple Bamboo Park yesterday. ... The ceremony, the third since the corner was launched in 1986, was co-sponsored by the university and China Daily.

Last year, a record 523,700 students from the Chinese mainland were studying abroad, up about 14 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Education.

The US is the top destination for overseas Chinese students, with 304,040 of them enrolled in US colleges and universities in the 2014-15 academic year, a 10.8 percent rise over the previous academic year, according to the 2015 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, published annually by the nonprofit Institute of International Education.