Chen Dong (astronaut) Chen Dong (astronaut) Chen Dong (; born 12 December 1978) is a Chinese pilot and astronaut selected as part of the Shenzhou program. A fighter pilot in the People's Liberation Army Air Force, he was selected to be a CNSA astronaut in 2010. Chen was born in Luoyang, Henan on 12 December 1978 from a working-class family. He holds a Master degree in Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University. He joined the People's Liberation Army Air Force in August 1997, achieving the rank of Colonel. Chen was selected for the second batch for Chinese astronauts in 2009 when he was a
Chinese as a foreign language neutral (轻声，denoted as no-mark in Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones. Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has six (often numbered as nine, but three are duplicates). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese. A French Jesuit, in a letter, relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding: Moser also stated that tones were a contributing factor to the difficulty of learning Chinese, partly because it is difficult for non-native learners to know how to convey emotion