Astronaut family Astronaut family An astronaut family is a family unit where the members reside in different countries across the world—in contrast to a "nuclear family". The astronaut family represents the growing transnationalism of peoples' identities that accompanies the growing globalization. The term was coined by Aihwa Ong in her publication "Flexible Citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality" in 1999. The term is especially used to describe Chinese families, who have spread across the globe. Astronaut families was a new economic source started in the early 80s for Chinese to migrate abroad and work under contracts or settle down and then send
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