The grand opening ceremony for the 2021 "Chinese Bridge" Mandarin Excellence Programme (MEP)Virtual Intensive Study in China was held Monday.

Initiated by the Department for Education (DfE) of the British government and delivered by UCL Institute of Education in partnership with the British Council and Centre for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC) of the Chinese Ministry of Education, MEP mainly serves to help more students to increase their fluency in the Chinese language and organizes annual intensive study visits to China for students who’ve gained basic knowledge of the language.

This year the China visit summer camp was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The opening ceremony of the summer camp was chaired by Director-General of CLEC Ma Jianfei. Among the honorable speakers were Vice-Minister of Education in China Tian Xuejun, vice-minister of Education in China; Minister of State for School Standards of DfE in the UK Nick Gibb; Director of British Council China and Minister for Culture and Education of British Embassy Matt Burney; and Director and Dean of UCL Institute of Education Li Wei.

About 2,000 teachers and students from 56 MEP schools and 14 Chinese host institutions attended the event.

In his speech, Tian Xuejun expressed his appreciation for the Chinese language teaching investments and efforts made by the British counterparts, encouraged the MEP students to master the language together with the young people in China, to carry on contributing to the everlasting friendship and collaborations between the two countries and to build a better and more harmonious world through mutual endeavor.

Nick Gibb identified the important place that people who speak Mandarin will have in the UK's future. He emphasized that having people from the UK who speak Mandarin was of strategic importance and would help to make new friendships and partnerships with China, and the MEP students were taking up the challenge of learning something that takes great effort and motivation. In the spirit of Marco Polo, that would continue to create a new era of mutual understanding and deeper connections between the two countries.

Matt Burney stressed that foreign languages were hugely important in today's global economy and Mandarin was the most spoken language in the world, and students of the program were building outstanding fluency in both written and spoken language and were giving themselves a valuable edge in numerous fields.