On June 8, Professor WANG Hui, Distinguished Professor and Dean of the International Culture and Social Development School at Zhejiang Normal University (ZJNU), and Chief Expert of a Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China, visited our College and delivered an academic lecture titled "Discipline Foundation, Distinctive Leadership, Integration of Research and Teaching, and Platform Empowerment: Thirty Years of Practice and Exploration in International Chinese Education at ZJNU." The lecture was presided over by LIU Yuying, Dean of the International Exchange College, and attended by representatives of the College faculty.

Professor Wang traced the 30-year trajectory of ZJNU's International Chinese Education program, which has consistently pursued the development philosophy of "discipline foundation, distinctive leadership, integration of research and teaching, and platform empowerment." Grounded in the disciplines of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and International Chinese Education, the program has focused on Chinese language education and research in Africa, yielding a substantial body of educational and scholarly achievements and forging a distinctive disciplinary and research system centered on African Chinese education.

Turning to the role of AI in empowering International Chinese Education, Professor Wang observed that artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping the content, methods, and assessment frameworks of Chinese language instruction. He shared his team's explorations in developing intelligent textbooks, digitalized teaching resources, and AI-assisted language pedagogy. While AI offers powerful tools for personalized instruction, cross-cultural communication, and multi-modal resource development, he noted, it also poses new challenges to the role of teachers, disciplinary boundaries, and ethical norms. Looking ahead, he identified "Chinese+" as an emerging trend in the field, calling for strengthened interdisciplinary collaboration to elevate the quality of International Chinese Education and China's international communication capacity.

The lecture was rich in substance and refreshing in perspective—taking stock of the program's disciplinary legacy while mapping out its future road map. It offered valuable guidance for the development of IEC newly approved undergraduate Chinese Language program and infused it with fresh impetus.