With a map of China on the wall behind him, 14-year-old Yasser al-Shaalan studied the names of professions in a Chinese textbook, one of thousands of Saudi Arabian children now learning the language at school.
Mandarin’s entry into public schools is the latest sign of growing ties between Saudi Arabia and China, as the oil-rich Gulf kingdom pushes to diversify its economy and strategic alliances.
“The pupils at the other schools are proficient in English. I know Arabic, English and Chinese, which is a great asset for my future,” al-Shaalan said.
Photo: AFP
Saudi Arabia in August last year introduced China’s official language as a compulsory second foreign language after English in six of its 13 administrative regions’ schools.
Al-Shaalan and his classmates have three Mandarin lessons a week, taught by their teacher Ma Shuaib, a Chinese national and Muslim who is fluent in Arabic.
In their classroom in northern Riyadh, close to the Saudi Arabian headquarters of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, al-Shaalan and his classmates learn Chinese characters shown on an electronic whiteboard.
“At first it was difficult, but now it has become easy and fun,” the teenager said.
Mandarin is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages, and the overwhelming majority of its speakers live in China.
After a visit to China in 2019, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman announced a plan to introduce Chinese throughout the education system.
Since then, several Saudi Arabian universities have opened programs in Chinese. In 2023, Prince Sultan University in Riyadh inaugurated the kingdom’s first branch of the Confucius Institute.
Following China’s emergence as a major economic power, Mandarin teaching has become increasingly popular worldwide, including in Europe.
However, in 2022 Germany warned the Confucius Institute language centers were being “used by the [Chinese] Communist Party for political ends.”
Dozens have closed in the US, Sweden, France, Australia and Canada over the past few years, following similar accusations.
In Saudi Arabia, no such fears have been expressed.
In Riyadh, Ma said that while “Chinese is one of the most difficult languages,” he uses “modern methods” to make it easier.
“I use a digital board, gestures and interactive games to motivate the students,” he said.
While learning Chinese is compulsory, marks for the course do not count toward the students’ overall grades.
“At the beginning, we focus on listening, speaking and reading, then we move on to writing,” added Ma, who teaches five classes a week at the Yazeed bin Abi Othman School.
“Chinese is the language of the future for economic communication. The world depends on China for many industries,” school director Sattam al-Otaibi said.
Thousands of Chinese people work in Saudi Arabia, particularly in Riyadh, where the airport now displays trilingual signs in Arabic, English and Chinese.
Saudi Arabia is a long-standing partner of the US, but has also strengthened its relations with China and Russia.
The Middle East’s largest economy is the world’s leading exporter of crude oil, with China taking about one-quarter of its shipments.
That has helped China become Saudi Arabia’s leading trade partner, with two-way trade exceeding US$100 billion in 2023, official figures showed.
Ties with Beijing have flourished during Prince Mohammad’s “Vision 2030” project to diversify his country’s oil-dominated economy and improve its image abroad.
At the same time, US-Saudi Arabia relations have fluctuated over the past few years. Former US president Joe Biden once pledged to make Saudi Arabia “a pariah” over the 2018 murder of dissident Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before later changing course.
A geopolitical rival to the US, China has worked to strengthen its influence in the Middle East. In 2023, it brokered a stunning rapprochement between heavyweight rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran after years of no ties between them.
“For Saudi Arabia, the relationship with China has become one of the most important,” said Umer Karim, an expert on Saudi Arabian foreign policy at the University of Birmingham.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has twice visited Riyadh, participating in Gulf-China and Arab-China summits attended by regional leaders.
Riyadh also hosted a Sino-Arab Investment Forum in 2023, where more than US$10 billion of investment agreements were signed with Chinese companies.
As economic exchanges step up, hundreds of Chinese teachers have already arrived in Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh plans to send Saudi Arabian teachers to learn Mandarin in China.
“The move to teach kids Chinese is again in line with the changing global order dynamics where China has emerged as the global economic powerhouse,” Karim said.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS