Well, my ladyfriend recently had to take French classes here in Paris (for visa reasons, her French is fine). One night standing outside waiting for her class to end, I started thinking about how many people leaving the school were Asian (most of whom, from what I could hear, were speaking Chinese).
Then I got to more thinking (I tend to do this). At the language school in Angers, France where the lovely lady and I met, my class of 20 people had 16 Asians, ten of whom were Chinese.
Another group of Chinese students I know studying international business (in English) here, and they say that, though the other students are all over the world, most of their classmates are Chinese.
Not just that, though, I notice a lot more Chinese tourists (some/many could be Taiwanese, though normally I can within a certain degree distinguish the accent) here in Paris, but I haven’t lived here that long.
So what have I gotten to thinking? I’m just wondering if there are any statistics showing that numbers of Chinese students/tourists have risen dramatically in recent years do to the boom there.
I find it interesting, just because with the enormous possible number of tourists coming from China (and other Asian countries who have seen considerable economic growth in recent years) could have some interesting effects.
I don’t know what exactly (no hotel vacanies?), but it would certainly be historic, wouldn’t it?
What you are seeing is most likely the effect of a booming Chinese economy (8% average annual GNP growth for at least a decade) giving more and more Chinese nationals the means to travel. With 1.2B people, even though only 20% or so live in the urban centers, that’s still 240M people-- almost as large as the population of the US, and much, much larger than any Western European country.
FWIW, many Chinese end up studying at European universities because those universities are more prestigious (and in many cases just plain better) than Chinese universities, and it is often easier to get student visas to European countries than it is for the U.S.
I’m well aware of that. That was the economic boom I mentioned.
I wrote:
I’ll admit though, I was recapping a weeks-worth Daily Show while I was writing this, so I was only half paying attention.
Let me put it better. I want to know if the numbers have really jumped in recent years, because I don’t have any insight on this. For all I know, this could just be a little more than usual.
Added to that, India’s economy has been expanding as well, but I don’t personally see the same number Indians around here. In all of the language schools my girlfriend and I have been to, I’ve never met one Indian. Though, at my university in the US, they were the largest non-American group.
I also want to know what some of the possible effects of hundreds of millions of middle class Chinese, Indian, or just Asian in general people who are ready to go out and see the world.
SHouldn’t that have a significant effect?
The first part of this is GQ (if someone has some statistics) the second part, I suppose, could be GD or IMHO…
Gotcha. I couldn’t follow what the OP was actually asking for.
This doesn’t precisely answer your question, but it gives you a good picture of what’s going on. Out of 700,000 Chinese who have studied abroad, 117,000 or so initiated their foreign studies in 2003, so it is pretty clear that the numbers are increasing rapidly. Just less than half of Chinese studying abroad go to Europe.
(Note: the idea that 527,000 Chinese students just haven’t returned yet to China is kind of laughable – I think Beijing will be waiting a loooooooooong time for many of those students to return to China, if you get my drift.)
This reminds me of a bit of apocrypha one of my mainland chinese coworkers (or- as we like to call them- “Commies”) told me with great pride. The story goes that Jimmy Carter was in China for talks with the Chinese Premier (Deng?) Carter was berating him for the tight controls the central government placed on chinese nationals trabelling abroad. Finally, the Premier had had enough.
“Fine,” he said to Carter, while picking up a pencil and a pad of paper; “How many do you want?”