Speaking about the government's higher education policies, the president noted that seven years ago when he took office he immediately advocated turning Taiwan into an Asia-Pacific center for higher education. Taiwan, he said, welcomes foreign students and students from mainland China to enter local institutions of higher education, which gives local students an opportunity to expand their international horizons without leaving the country. A total of about 93,000 overseas students came to Taiwan last year to study, which is three times more than the 30,000 students that were coming here annually when he took office. The president hopes this number will reach 100,000 or even 110,000 prior to his leaving office.
The president stated that the ROC uses orthodox characters in the instruction of Chinese, whereas mainland Chinese uses simplified characters. While some people have expressed concerns that this affects student recruitment efforts, the president said that in fact the promotion of simplified characters in the mainland focuses on roughly 2,200 characters, which constitutes one-fourth to one-third of commonly used characters. And of these simplified characters, less than 500 bear no similarity to their orthodox counterparts. Consequently, students can learn both types of characters when looking up characters in dictionaries published here. In other words, students can learn both types of characters when they learn Chinese in Taiwan, he said. Over 15,000 foreign students came to Taiwan to learn Chinese last year, and it is hoped that this number will reach 29,000 in 2016 and grow further to over 40,000 in 2021. This, the president said, will enable Taiwan to become a global center for Chinese language learning and further promote cultural exchanges.
【Source: Office of the President】