China has become the biggest destination in Asia for British students, with numbers continuing to grow despite the pandemic, China's ambassador to London told a gathering of education leaders.

Speaking at an event to mark the upcoming Lunar New Year, Zheng Zeguang said the UK had also benefited from an increase in Chinese students over the last 12 months.

"In 2021, through the joint efforts of both China and the UK, exchanges and cooperation in the field of education between the two countries rose to [the] challenge, making progress and achieving exciting and rewarding results," the ambassador said in an online meeting.

He said regular dialog between the embassy and the UK education ministry had resumed following an interruption caused by the pandemic and hailed the work of education partnerships. Around 190,000 students have participated in studies run by 396 Sino-British co-operative institutions while five million people participated in Chinese language teaching and cultural activities at Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms across the UK last year.

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Looking forward, Zheng told his audience including the Director-General of the British Council and the chair of the International Committee of the Association of University Heads, China and the UK could deepen even further their collaboration.

He called for:

• More policy communication so that both countries could benefit from advances in educational processes

• A deepening of mutual learning to combine China's huge resource in terms of teaching capacity with the UK's innovation and

• A consolidation in cooperation to create ambassadors who could help build bridges and open up mutually beneficial opportunities

Separately, Zheng visited Imperial College, London, to pass on his New Year greetings to representatives of Chinese student groups. He also participated in a video to send best wishes from students in the UK to competitors at the Winter Olympics in Beijing which begin next week.