People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps twelve were chosen as astronaut candidates. The Astronaut Corps was established in January 1998 and the twelve along with two PLAAF trainees sent to Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in 1996 forms Chinese Group 1. Seven pilots entered the Astronaut Corps in May 2010 as the Group 2. In 2014, Group 1 astronauts Wu Jie, Li Qinglong, Chen Quan, Zhao Chuandong, and Pan Zhanchun retired from the Astronaut Corps due to age; none of them had flown in a mission. The Astronaut Corps was part of the General Armaments Department until GAD's disbandment in January 2016. As part of the
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