As fortune has it, the Chinese Government National Tourism Office based in London have given me a regular public speaking gig in promoting the scenic sights of the ancient Silk Road to audiences in London, Copenhagen and Stockholm (see images below). As I have more talks lined up in the next month, this makes an ideal theme for this week’s article as a topic of immediate interest to your pupils.
If you are a person who watches CCTV news daily, as a way to keep up your Chinese, or as a native Chinese who likes to keep abreast of your country’s current affairs, you will notice that every single programme centres around (the “One Belt, One Road” strategy, otherwise known as the “Silk Road Initiative”).
For those of you who are not aware (it is actually quite astonishing the amount of people that don’t know!), the goal of this colossal Chinese government-led project is to recreate the ancient Silk Road in order to connect all major cities that are situated along almost two thirds of the world’s land mass (!!).
Now as you can see from the figures above, this is absolutely astounding, and not only covers land, but also water, as one can see from the projected route below:
The scale of this project is simply massive and is bound to be of relevance to your pupils in the future. Why? Well, where will these countries look to hire people to run the projects along this route effectively? Who will they most want to seek to run them?
Yes, they may consider just hiring locally, but as is widely known, following the rise of globalisation, local companies tend to look far and wide to find the right candidate. Take the UK Crossrail project worth £15bn for example – who is the project manager and where are they from? Linda Miller from the US. Which architect designed the Shard? Renzo Piano from Italy. Now look at the graphs below just to see how much Chinese investment there is in the UK and the stakes they have in our companies:
Quite significant huh?
If that isn’t enough then read these articles in the links below published only in the last few months about the UK and our involvement in this world-changing initiative, and please do share them with your students, as this initiative is without doubt going to have an impact on them. This is especially if they have knowledge of Chinese language and they have knowledge of Chinese language and culture, and know how to interact with Chinese people. They may not realise it now, but as Chinese is still a growing subject in schools, which will grow rapidly thanks to the combined efforts of the MEP and Swire Chinese Language Programme in the next few years, these students will be in pole position to make a niche for themselves in the hot job market that will be borne from the colossus that is the Silk Road Initiative.
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