Professor Emeritus Azirah Hashim was invited to the 2023 China-ASEAN Language and Culture Forum and the 2023 China-ASEAN Education Cooperation Week from 25-31 August 2023. The Education Cooperation Week was hosted by the Ministry of Foreign affairs of P.R. China, the Ministry of Education of P.R China and Guizhou Provincial People’s Government and organized by Guizhou Provincial Department of Education and the Foreign Affairs Office of Guizhou Province and co-organised by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) and the ASEAN-China Centre (ACC). CAECW is the only governmental platform for China-ASEAN educational cooperation and exchanges and plays an active role in promoting educational cooperation and people-to-people exchange between China and ASEAN and contributes to the Belt and Road cooperation. Azirah was invited by Quanzhou Normal University’s Silk Road Language and Culture Centre to give lectures and take part in academic exchanges at Quanzhou Normal University, Xiamen University Teaching Materials Centre and Guiyang University. In Guiyang, she gave a keynote speech at the Language and Culture Forum with the theme “Language Diversity in the Digital Era”. The Silk Road Language and Culture Research Centre is a research institution under the State Language Commission jointly established by the Department of Language and Text Information Management of the Ministry of Education, PRC and the Fujian Provincial Department of Education and Quanzhou Normal University. The Centre has as its aim to describe the status of the Silk Road languages, build language repositories, provide macro decision-making consultation and serve national language strategies.
