Iranian students get full picture of Chinese achievements

TEHERAN — In the courtyard of the Chinese embassy in Iran, questions and answers were exchanged between Iranian students and the Chinese ambassador among rows of photos depicting China.

Mobina Moradkhani, a third-year Chinese major at the University of Teheran, looked at a picture of cars moving on a road between skyscrapers. According to the caption, they were self-driving cars in the high-level autonomous driving demo area in Beijing.

"Has autonomous driving been widely promoted in China?" she asks.

"Experiments are still being carried out in designated areas in major cities such as Beijing, and I believe they will be applied more widely in the future," said Chinese Ambassador to Iran Chang Hua while ushering the students visiting a photo exhibition themed "An Extraordinary Decade of China in the New Era".

The ambassador guided the students from the Confucius Institute at the University of Teheran and introduced to them in detail the achievements made by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people in the past 10 years.

Another picture of wild elephants sleeping soundly impressed Moradkhani even more.

She learned that a herd of 17 Asian elephants from a State-level nature reserve in Xishuangbanna in Southwest China's Yunnan province began to migrate northward in March 2020. During the journey which lasted more than 10 months, people quietly made way for the elephants wherever they roamed.

Moradkhani had always believed China was prosperous, and the tall buildings and technological development in the photos exhibited confirmed her impression. Yet the story of the elephants presented her a China "full of love," she says.

Sepehr Fouladnia, 31, was the oldest among the students. A junior majoring in Chinese, he obtained a bachelor's degree in economics and worked in a bank before deciding to pursue an undergraduate degree in Chinese.

"China has played a very key global role in many areas over the past decade, and there are many lessons for developing countries to learn … The Iranians are interested in the latest developments in China, and Iran needs to strengthen ties with China and learn from China's development strategy for modernization," Fouladnia says.

Learning Chinese can empower him to help his country "promote its relations with China and learn from China's experience in such fields as economics, politics and technology", he says.

Chinese Director of the Confucius Institute Li Mei was pleased that her students loved the special "class" at the embassy.

"Compared with learning about China from textbooks, visiting this photo exhibition can help students learn more about the latest developments in China and stimulate their interest in learning Chinese," she says.

Xinhua