Chilean education addresses Asian issues

By David Azócar

Until the mid-1990's, the most important country was, in economic terms (and hence global terms) the United States. Most of the world revolved around its social, cultural, political and even linguistic axis. Things have changed, though, and now the world is increasingly conscious of the East and its heretofore little known society and culture.

One of Asia’s main attractions to other nations has been its financial sector. The major Asian economies have experienced steady growth, which has allowed them to expand their business interests into the most remote areas of the planet. For example, some of Asia’s economies have created trade networks here in Latin America.

Traditional education

Chile is no exception, having shown deep and consistent interest in all aspects of these distant lands. All this is due to the close relationship that our nation has maintained for some time with the Asian powers, mainly through exports. Chile has also benefited from numerous treaties and FTAs with countries such as China, Korea, Japan and India.

As such, and primarily because Chile is aware of the advantages of a wide-spectrum approach to Asia, the leading Chilean universities have created departments dedicated to research on Asia-Pacific issues. These academics want to inform Chileans about Asia’s most relevant economic, political, cultural and social issues. "We are living in the Asia-Pacific century. Therefore we must cover more, in academics terms, than a simple treatment of Western tradition. Asia has been of growing interest to students lately, both in terms of cultural admiration and professional interest,” states Julie Kim, coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Center, Universidad Diego Portales.

Asian Studies faculties offer an academic perspective and often tend to be an important link for the private or diplomatic sector, their research being of value to same.

Student interest in Asian issues has grown significantly, as stated. Today there are several alternatives in Asian Studies at Chilean universities. These faculties mainly focus on postgraduate study. For interested parties, the following are among the programs being offered in 2008: Diploma in Asian Culture and Diploma in Asian Studies at Universidad Catolica; Asian Landscape Design at Finis Terrae; and Diploma in Regional Studies, Major in Asia-Pacific at the USACH.

The boom in learning Asian languages

In addition to these other areas of study, Mandarin Chinese has been taught since 2005 in Chile, completely demolishing the myth of the language’s complexity. There are several institutes that offer Mandarin taught by native speakers. Students of all ages and professions study Chinese, but the majority are executives and professionals. "It is necessary to learn Chinese nowadays. Law students, engineers and managers (all need it)," says Su Jen Huang, Director of the Chinese Cultural Center in Santiago.

The center expects to have its first graduates within two years, whereas the complete course involves nine semesters of language study.

If we consider that Chinese is the most commonly spoken language due to the number of Chinese people, it is not difficult to understand why the sudden interest on the part Chileans and everyone else, too. An estimated 1.3 billion people are native speakers of Chinese. Thus, universities are expanding their faculties to include Mandarin and Japanese.

Japanese was the first language to be offered in our country. This first effort was at the University of Santiago, with its Japanese-English translation degree. In this initial phase, most Asian firms setting up shop in Chile were Japanese.

According to some experts, the Asian economies are growing by 9% on average. Growth like this is difficult to achieve in countries like Chile, at least in the short term. Chile is offering more Asia Studies programs mainly due to economic reasons, and more specifically with an aim of being a bridge between Latin America and the East, which is getting closer every day.