Siberian Federal University

The event was officially supported by the Russian Embassy in China and Ministry of Education of China. SibFU participated in the symposium as a member of Russian-Chinese Association of Universities specialized in training economics students. The event was attended by a few VIP guests.

SibFU representative Yaroslav Sokolovsky (associate professor at the Department of Business foreign language, School of Economics, Management and Environmental Studies) noted: “A wide range of issues has been discussed at the symposium. The key message, however, was focused on the need of universities to be consolidated in the field of training new generation of professionals: experts who are good at economics as much as they are fluent in both Russian and Chinese”.

“Considering the exceptional level of geographical integration between Russia and China, it seems reasonable to have more specialists with not only language proficiency, but major knowledge in international trading policy and management as well. Collaboration of universities within this Russian-Chinese association is the main means of reaching such goal,” – Evgeny Tomikhin, the counselor-minister at the Embassy of Russia in Beijing, assumes.

Similar thoughts have been shared by many colleagues at the symposium. The Dean of the Russian language faculty at Shanghai University Zhang Zili noted: “I believe, the time has come to build a cross-disciplinary platform integrating language and economics. This is a challenge of a current economic situation”.

Victor Kovtun, the head of Gazprom representative office in China, also agreed that nowadays a serious lack of experts in international economics fluent in the languages can be observed. Moreover, as he pointed, there is a high demand in experts in the field of oil and gas, who are not only fluent in Chinese and Russian, but equally good at specific engineering knowledge.