Moscow Students Protest Decision Making Chinese a Mandatory Subject at MFTI

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – Students at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have circulated a petition protesting the decision of the school’s administration to require all students to study Chinese, something that will be achieved by dropping the availability of instruction in all Western languages except English.

            The students say, and some agree with them, that machine translations can handle scientific materials from China; but other experts disagree and suggest the students are failing to recognize that they will make better careers, be paid more and even have the chance to work abroad more often if they master Chinese (vz.ru/society/2023/3/30/1205221.html).

            Aleksey Maslov, head of the Institute for Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, is among the supporters of the introduction of the new Chinese requirement at MFTI and sees it as the first step to requiring Chinese as a language option in Russian schools beginning from the early grades.

            But the objections of the students at MFTI suggest that there is going to be resistance to any such drive, with most students preferring to study English or other Western languages rather than Chinese.