CONFUCIUS, the ancient inspiration for Chinese thinking, is to be honoured in Scotland with the creation of a cultural institute.
Edinburgh University is to be host to one of 100 global Confucius Institutes being set up by the Chinese government round the world to promote the country, its language, culture, and business links abroad.
The move sits well with the Scottish Executive's new strategy for engaging with China, which will target economic and cultural links with a chosen Chinese province, which is yet to be announced , and on economic sectors where Scottish expertise is in demand, including financial services and life sciences.
The Confucius agreement was sealed yesterday in Beijing by Jack McConnell during a meeting with Zhou Ji, the education minister.
The first minister's visit to China, his second in 18 months, lasted only 36 hours on the return journey from the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. But before his flight home, he told The Herald that the decision to site the institute in Edinburgh showed his hosts' recognition that Scotland wanted to build two-way cultural links, rather than simply exploiting the rapid growth of the emerging economic giant.
The initiative is to be backed with a pilot project in Mandarin language-learning at four Scottish schools, starting this summer.
Chinese teachers are to work at secondaries in Edinburgh, Haddington, and Dunbar as part of the exchange, and Mr McConnell yesterday met Louise Crowe from Perthshire, a Scot teaching English at a school in Beijing.
He also hosted a "Chinese Ask Jack" session with 200 young people at one of the country's leading business universities. Some of them were among the 400 business students who have enrolled for the first two years of a Napier University course in Beijing, before many of them finish their degrees in Edinburgh. This is one of the first such split courses to operate in the country.
At his meeting with Professor Zhou, there was an agreement to set up a joint project for the Chinese to learn from Scotland's experience in vocational and distance learning. This is in response to the Beijing government's urgent concern that economic growth near its east coast is leaving western areas behind and threatening instability.
There is a vast migration of people into the cities in search of work, but with poor skills. Mr McConnell said: "There's a hope we can provide some help on a Scottish scale to help them with that."
Reflecting on his visit to Melbourne, the first minister said he returned to Scotland convinced that Glasgow could put on the Commonwealth Games in 2014, but admitted the biggest doubts were whether Scotland had the sporting base and team to justify it.
"If there was one doubt last week being expressed in Melbourne, it was that we have a team that was fit to be the host nation, " he said.
"The outstanding performance of our athletes has shown that we not only have the capacity to organise international events, but we also have the support services in place to back up international competitors."
Scholar and teacher
K'ung Fu-tzu was a famed scholar and teacher who lived 2500years ago in the Chou dynasty.
His influence was strongest on education, stressing the need to carry forward tradition from forefathers, and teaching that harmony comes from imitating a golden age of the past.
He was denounced as reactionary and feudal in Mao Tse-tung's 1949 revolution and in the cultural revolution, though the communist leader's teaching reflected many of the same deep-rooted themes.
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