Recently, seven departments including the Ministry of Education and the National Language Commission jointly issued the "Opinions on Further Promoting the Inheritance and Development of Excellent Chinese Language and Culture and Improving the Language and Cultural Literacy of the Entire Population". The document outlines overall requirements, aiming to basically establish a system for the inheritance and development of excellent Chinese language and culture by 2030, achieving coordinated progress in scientific interpretation, educational popularization, resource development, digital empowerment, team building, promotion, and exchange. By 2035, the goal is to comprehensively enhance the inheritance and development of excellent Chinese language and culture and the overall language and cultural literacy level of the population, significantly strengthening its capacity to support national development.
In terms of promoting educational普及, the Opinions specify tracing the evolution of writing systems such as Oracle Bone Script, Bronze Script, and Seal Script. It calls for utilizing cultural relic resources like ancient calligraphies, steles, and cliff inscriptions to inherit cultural treasures such as calligraphy and seal carving, showcasing ancient Chinese civilization achievements like printing and papermaking, and conducting language and cultural education that reflects the great achievements of the new era. The document encourages relevant institutions to implement distinctive language and culture projects and advocates for libraries, museums, cultural centers, and publishers to carry out language and cultural activities.
Regarding resource protection and development, the Opinions indicate the need to strengthen the investigation, collation, scientific protection, and standardized preservation of language resources. It emphasizes promoting the significance of Oracle Bone Script's inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, improving the protection and inheritance mechanism for ancient writing resources, and enhancing the development and sharing of language resources. Efforts should focus on extracting educational resources from Chinese classics, red classics, and documents on China's achievements and experiences, with priority support for the construction of the Chinese Language Resources Museum.
The Opinions will accelerate the digital construction of language and cultural resources. Key tasks for strengthening digital empowerment include building corpora and resource databases for Oracle Bone Script, classical and modern Chinese, and language culture, underpinned by the national key corpus data infrastructure construction plan, and promoting key technological innovations in ancient book digitization.
On building a strong talent pool, the Opinions propose intensifying the development of language disciplines. It supports the implementation of the "Strong Foundation Plan" for Paleography to foster discipline construction and cultivate top-notch innovative talent, ensuring that niche disciplines like Oracle Bone Script studies have practitioners and successors. The document also supports universities in exploring the establishment of language science majors, promotes the integration of language disciplines with related fields, and encourages qualified universities to explore talent cultivation models combining "professional skills + language ability + cross-cultural competence" to aid the "going global" of Chinese culture.
Simultaneously, the Opinions point out the need to build brands for excellent Chinese language and cultural exchange, create new highlights for language and cultural cooperation, and promote mutual learning among civilizations. Focusing on major initiatives like the high-quality co-construction of the "Belt and Road", international language and cultural exchanges should be conducted to effectively communicate China's voice. Active cooperation with international organizations such as UNESCO and proactive participation in global language governance will contribute China's strength.
Excellent Chinese language and culture, with its long history and rich内涵, is an important component of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics. It serves as a crucial foundation for enhancing value guidance through culture and an important support for fulfilling the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education. The Opinions emphasize strengthening the Party's leadership over the inheritance and development of excellent Chinese language and culture, ensuring that upholding and strengthening Party leadership runs through all aspects of the work to maintain the correct political direction.
The seven issuing departments will collaborate with other relevant bodies to coordinate and advance the nationwide work on language and cultural inheritance and development. They will establish a multi-department collaborative working mechanism and a regional expert guidance mechanism. This effort aims to provide strong support for promoting the creative transformation and innovative development of excellent Chinese language and culture, laying the foundation for national language capacity building, serving the consolidation of the sense of community for the Chinese nation, contributing to the promotion of a shared future for mankind, and building a strong country in education, culture, and talent.