Cultural interaction

The number of Confucius Institutes and classes has jumped to 554 in 90 countries in five years and the number of foreign students learning Chinese has similarly increased to 230,000. These numbers show that China is increasingly attracting the world's attention.

However the spread of culture globally can never be a one-way transmission to the rest of world. In this global village made smaller by the Internet and modern transport, it is impossible for the culture of any single country to dominate.

As a country with one-fifth of the world's population, China suffers from a great deficit when it comes to the world's understanding of its culture. When the country was weak and bullied by Western powers in the late 19th and early 20th century, Westerners only knew of the downside or mysterious aspects.