GDUFS Hosted 2015 Intercultural Education Seminar

On October 10th, 2015, the Intercultural Education Seminar was held on the north campus, aiming to improve the education of foreign languages and the spread of Chinese culture. FANG Fanquan, Vice President of GDUFS; LUO Minqiu, President of Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World; and linguists from other universities attended the seminar.

At the beginning of the seminar, FANG showed his deep gratitude to all attendees. He introduced the history of GDUFS and the efforts the university has made to honor its motto. He said that GDUFS would continue working on improving intercultural education. Then LUO delivered a brief speech in which she expressed her heartfelt thanks to the people and departments which contributed to the seminar.

The scene of the seminar

LI Xiangzhe, professor of Korean at Sungkyunkwan University, gave a lecture: The Rhetoric of Political Language. He illustrated his thoughts with excerpts from Surrender Rescript of Japanese Mikado, which used a lot of blurry words attempting to mislead domestic citizens and cover up the truth. Also, he pointed out that the translation might misconstrue the original meaning to a degree.

Following this was ZHANG Weixiong, professor of Japanese at Sapporo University, and member of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies. He discussed the rhetoric of modern Japanese in his speech. Based on a series of typical Japanese government announcements, he succeeded in explaining the style of announcements and impressing all the attendees.

Professor QU Weiguo from Fudan University, China, analyzed the problems of present intercultural education. He started his speech with his own experience and then introduced the topic: What Kind of Culture Should a Country Spread? He claimed that when it came to Chinese culture, people always tended to talk about the traditional culture that was different from the modern one. Professor QU concluded that modern culture also needed incorporating into intercultural education.

Finally, two professors from GDUFS delivered their speeches. CHEN Duoyou, professor of the Faculty of Asian Languages and Cultures, presented the distinct features of near-modern Japanese. He illustrated the developing process of Japanese linguistic nationalism and its features in different periods. Professor CHEN worried that this linguistic nationalism might influence the expanse of foreign languages. And Professor WU Fangfei from the Faculty of Chinese Language and Culture discussed the Internet language and culture in modern China, which had increasingly raised public concerns in recent years. He said that it was impossible to prevent the development of Internet language, even though it definitely affected Chinese, and what the government could do was to guide the public to use it in a more appropriate way.

The group picture

After the seminar, all attendees took a group photo to commemorate this meaningful discussion.