More and more Chinese are saying ‘Si!’ to Spanish

Twenty years after the Cervantes Institute opened its Beijing center, interest in learning Spanish has grown rapidly across China.

The institute's latest yearbook, Spanish in the World 2026, says China has nearly 98,000 potential Spanish speakers, with language course enrollments across universities rising 12.6 percent between 2023 and 2025.

"Spanish-language education at Chinese universities dates back to the 1950s, and by the time the class of 2025 graduates, Chinese universities will have produced about 55,000 graduates in Hispanic studies," said Yang Ming, professor at Shanghai International Studies University, at a news conference for the yearbook's release in Beijing on Saturday.

He cited yearbook data showing that in 2000, only 12 Chinese universities offered Spanish programs. Now courses are available in more than 100 higher education institutions nationwide.

With Spanish included in China's official secondary education curriculum in 2018, about 180 secondary schools were offering Spanish courses as of last year, he added.

The presentation of the yearbook was part of an international symposium titled "Spanish in China: Evolution and New Dynamics", which was held from October 24 to 25 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Cervantes Institute in Beijing.

Spain established the public institution in Madrid in 1991 to promote the teaching, study and use of Spanish worldwide and to contribute to the dissemination of Hispanic cultures. It opened its Beijing center in 2006, the Spanish government's first cultural center in China, and a second followed in Shanghai in 2024.

Luis Garcia Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, said that the Beijing launch marked the first time the yearbook has been released outside of Spain, and this year's edition includes a special section focusing on China.

"In the complex world we live in — a world where multiculturalism is being undermined by arrogance and insular identities — the collaboration between the two international languages with the largest number of native speakers, Chinese and Spanish, serves as a reminder of the importance of mutual understanding in the face of miscommunication and the refusal to engage in dialogue," Garcia Montero said.

"It is all well and good to be the language of Cervantes or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but we must also develop Spanish into a language of science and technology, one capable of addressing the digital transformation and the rise of artificial intelligence that we are currently experiencing."

According to the yearbook, there are more than 520 million native Spanish speakers worldwide, making it the third most-spoken native language after Chinese and Hindi. The number of Spanish users has increased by 10 million in 2026, the yearbook says, bringing the total number of people with some level of proficiency in the language to 640 million.

Ma Yibin contributed to this story.