On January 10, 2022, at 3:00 p.m., "Step on the Chinese Bridge, Start the Chinese Farm Machinery Culture Experience Tour", organized by Language and Culture Center of Jiangsu University, started successfully online.

Jiang Yonghua, the project leader and deputy director of the Language and Culture Center, attended the opening ceremony and delivered a speech. He said that the program aims to integrate Chinese language learning and Chinese agricultural machinery culture experience through online Chinese teaching, visits and operations, and introduce modern China to overseas Chinese learners with a unique perspective.  

Director Tang Min of the International Chinese Language Teaching Department of the Language and Culture Center presided over the opening ceremony and gave a brief explanation of the requirements of the event. Class teachers, some student volunteers and campers attended the opening ceremony.

In order to ensure the learning effect and facilitate full interaction among the campers, the program divided the campers into three small classes, each with a class teacher and a student volunteer. After the opening ceremony, the three classes had a teacher-student meeting where the campers introduced their names, which country they came from, whether they had studied Chinese and what they knew about China, creating a cordial atmosphere for the rest of the study.

In the first Chinese language session that followed, the campers and the lecturer actively interacted with each other and the class was effective. Some participants expressed their intention to come to Jiangsu University to learn Chinese, while others said, “We have witnessed that China and Jiangsu University have a lot of knowledge and wisdom that we Ethiopians must learn from.”

The Online Chinese Bridge is an online exchange program organized by the Chinese Language Cooperation Center to keep the enthusiasm of overseas Chinese language learners and to meet their needs for understanding Chinese language and culture. In this program, the Language and Culture Center of Jiangsu University highlights the university’s strength in agricultural machinery and its profound culture, and uses this as the starting point to create the “Chinese+” program, with "live+recorded" rich and diverse courses, including contextual Chinese, terms for agricultural machinery, visiting exhibition hall online, poetry recitation in Chinese agricultural literature, and introduction to agricultural machinery independently developed by Jiangsu University. The program is designed to enhance the interest of the campers in learning Chinese and to provide them with a multi-faceted understanding of agricultural wisdom and agricultural machinery achievements in ancient and contemporary China.

The program started on January 10, 2022 and lasted for 10 days. 131 campers from more than 20 countries, including Ethiopia, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cameroon, Namibia, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, enrolled in the program. (Language and Culture Center of Jiangsu University)