The 145 Confucius Institutes spread around the globe now have a headquarters to guide them in ensuring high quality and better coordination.

Inaugurating the headquarters in Beijing yesterday, State Councilor Chen Zhili said it will draft standards for Chinese language teaching while Minister of Education Zhou Ji added that it will expand cooperation among the institutes in 52 countries and regions.

The expansion momentum will continue this year, and it was imperative to build a supervisory body for the non-profit public institutes promoting Chinese language and culture, said Zhao Guocheng, deputy director of the Chinese Language Council International (CLCI), a government body which co-ordinates language-teaching globally.

"The number of institutes is growing with the rising demand for Chinese language teaching abroad. And demand is growing vigorously," Zhao told China Daily yesterday.

Latest figures from the Ministry of Education suggest that more than 40 million people are learning Chinese worldwide - 10 million more than a year ago - creating an acute demand for teachers and teaching institutes, said Zhao.

On Sunday, the CLCI signed an agreement with Novosibirsk State Technical University to build the fourth Confucius Institute in Russia, on the heels of a similar pact signed with Nebraska-Lincoln University in the United States last week.

Since the first agreement on building a pilot institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was signed in June 2004, with President Hu Jintao attending the ceremony, hundreds of foreign universities, colleges and other organizations have applied to the CLCI to set up Confucius institutes. The council received more than 400 applications by the end of last year.

While there were only six such institutes at the end of 2004, 42 were set up worldwide by the end of 2005, and the number nearly tripled to 125 by the end of 2006.

Besides teaching Chinese and training teachers, the institutes also conduct examinations and provide consultancy services on Chinese culture, economy and society.

Source: China Daily