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 and Macau and has traditionally been the dominant language among most Overseas Chinese communities. A number of universities outside Hong Kong and Macau offer Cantonese within their Chinese-language departments as well, especially in the UK and North America. The interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West, the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed. Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt. John Webb, the British architect, went a step