The opening speech at the opening ceremony of the conference was delivered by Deputy Prime Minister Liu Jan-tung. In her speech, she stressed out that the Confucius Institutes have to make more efforts to adapt to the local customs, and also, the process of this “integration” should be speeded up. She also mentioned that the next important step what the institutes need to do in the forthcoming year is to integrate to the hosts’ cultural life, embracing the local attitude mind and customs in order to improve mutual understanding.

 

In response to the invitation, Dr. Ujhelyi István as Member of the European Parliament and also as the Founding President of the Confucius Institute at University of Szeged gave a lecture at one of the panels of the Rector’s Forum. In his speech he expressed that one of his main goal is to establish still closer Chinese-Hungarian and Chinese-European links, and also due to his post at the European Parliament he wishes to capture its benefits in order to help the Confucius Institute at the University of Szeged, Szeged and Hungary as well. To this end, he had already contacted the Confucius Institute at Brussels with the delegation of Confucius Institute at University.

 

Representatives of 126 countries – altogether 475 institutes and 851 Confucius classrooms - participated in the 9^th Conference of Confucius Institutes event. The primary aim of the non-profit organizations is to spread Chinese language and culture to a wide audience. Hanban has more than 3. 45 million registered students all over the world and Chinese as a second language has been implanted to more than 80 countries. In hundreds of countries more than 200 teachers were trained, and gave opportunity for more than 25 thousand students to participate in different levels of Chinese education.