Initiative to boost ties in education with France

China has launched an initiative to attract more French students and young people to study and exchange programs, aiming to deepen educational cooperation with France.

The initiative was announced during the Sino-French Education Development Forum held in Paris on Friday. It follows President Xi Jinping's pledge in May to increase the number of French students studying in China to over 10,000 and double the scale of European youth exchanges within the next three years.

Vivien Deroche, a student at Ecole Centrale de Lyon who applied for a place in a master's degree program in environmental engineering at Tsinghua University, will be one of the first 16 students to come to China under the initiative.