Liu Yang (astronaut) Liu Yang (astronaut) Liu Yang (born October 6, 1978) is a Chinese pilot and astronaut who served as a crew member on the space mission Shenzhou 9. On June 16, 2012, Liu became the first Chinese woman in space. Liu was born in Zhengzhou, Henan in 1978, into a worker's family of Linzhou, Anyang origin. She graduated from PLA Air Force Aviation University in Changchun. Liu joined the PLA Air Force in 1997 and qualified as a pilot before becoming the deputy head of a flight unit, holding the PLAAF rank of major. She is a veteran pilot with 1,680
Chinese as a foreign language using intonation whilst retaining the correct tones. Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education. Still, in most of the Western universities, the study of the Chinese language is only a part of Chinese Studies or sinology, instead of an independent discipline. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is known as "duiwai hanyu jiaoxue" (). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world. The People's Republic of China began to accept foreign