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 China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the People's Republic of China started in 1950 at Tsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with Bulgaria in 1952, China