On September 18, GXU held a workshop on building a multimodal database of Chinese learners in ASEAN countries at Junwu Hall. Xu Huarui, Secretary of the CPC GXU Committee, met with the participating experts. Zhang Yuanliang, Deputy Director of the Department of Education of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and Liang Enwei, Vice President of GXU, attended the workshop and delivered remarks.

Zhang Yuanliang said that advancing the digital and intelligent transformation of international Chinese-language education and strengthening the development of language education resources oriented toward ASEAN are essential both to serving China’s neighboring diplomacy and broader opening-up and to fulfilling Guangxi’s responsibility in education. He expressed the hope that GXU would use the workshop as an opportunity to further pool resources, refine its research priorities, and make its distinctive work more substantive and prominent, producing more high-quality, replicable, and scalable outcomes.

Liang Enwei introduced GXU’s continuing efforts in regional research and practice in Chinese-language education. He noted that developing a learner-resource system based on multimodal integration is a key area that GXU plans to address in the future. He expressed the hope that GXU would further deepen collaborative innovation with universities and research institutions across China and use such innovation to empower the digital transformation of international Chinese-language education.

At the workshop, the multimodal database of Chinese learners in ASEAN countries was officially launched. Relevant project representatives reported on the database’s development concept, implementation process, and achievements to date. The database has already incorporated multiple corpora, completed multidimensional data alignment, and established a specialized secondary database tailored to the characteristics of ASEAN learners. It provides a solid data foundation for frontline international Chinese-language teaching and linguistics-related research.

During the keynote presentations and discussion sessions, participating experts exchanged views on multimodal data collection for Chinese learners in ASEAN, regional typological research, and artificial intelligence-assisted Chinese-language teaching. They also offered recommendations for database development and the high-quality advancement of international Chinese-language education as an academic discipline.

The workshop highlighted GXU’s phased innovations in digital Chinese-language research oriented toward ASEAN. Going forward, GXU will fully incorporate the consensus reached at the workshop, continuously improve the database’s functions and content, enrich the supply of digital resources for Chinese-language education in ASEAN, strengthen its international Chinese-language education research platform serving ASEAN, and contribute to closer people-to-people ties between China and ASEAN.