Every year, the Bali Mandarin Center welcomes about 300 Indonesian students to learn Mandarin. Most of these students work in the hospitality and tourism sector — the key industry in Bali — and are keen to learn Mandarin as more Chinese tourists visit the Indonesian resort island.
In fact, some of these students work at I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport, and they are using their language skills to help arriving and departing Chinese visitors, according to Ye Lu, founder of the Bali Mandarin Center.
Ye, who hails from East China’s Zhejiang province, established the language learning center in 2009. The entrepreneur, in her 30s, saw business potential after she helped a former classmate develop a Mandarin curriculum for an international school in Bali.
Ye decided to relocate to Bali, and in the succeeding years she used her language skills to teach employees in hotels and duty-free shops, tour guides, police officers and university students. She is confident that the number of Chinese tourists in Bali and other parts of Indonesia will increase significantly in the future, which will drive local demand for Chinese skills.