Liu Boming (astronaut) Liu Boming (astronaut) Liu Boming (; born September 1966) is a Chinese pilot selected as part of the Shenzhou program. A fighter pilot in the People's Liberation Army Air Force, he was selected to be an CNSA member in 1998. Liu, along with Zhai Zhigang and Jing Haipeng, was chosen to be the main crew of "Shenzhou 7", with Zhai as commander, on 17 September 2008. On 25 September, at 21:10 CST, they launched into space as China's third human spaceflight mission, and the first Chinese mission ever to have a three-man crew. Liu and Zhai participated in China's first-ever
Chinese as a foreign language Chinese in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first European Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire. Since then sinology became an academic discipline in the West, with the secular sinologists outnumbering the missionary ones. Some of the big names in the history of linguistics took up the study of Chinese. Sir William Jones dabbled in it; instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor. Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a Qing dynasty decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of