Chinese President Xi Jinping pays a state visit to France as both countries mark the 60th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic relations. In an interview for The Hub in Paris, Nicolas Idier, inspector-general of Chinese language education at the French Ministry of National Education, tells Wang Guan that with some 40,000 young schoolchildren taking up Mandarin as a foreign language, learning "the incredibly rich Chinese language" can be traced back to cultural exchanges centuries ago. "It's not a fad," Idier says, "it's truly rooted in French culture."