Chinese in the Levant

Regarding Scott's recent post about the growing role of China in Egypt, the Middle Kingdom is starting to make it's influence felt in the rest of the Middle East as well. Here's an article from the Daily Star about trilingualism in Lebanon, which seems to be saying that English is becoming more important than French, the language of Lebanon's former colonial overlords. But farther down (paragraph 33), an academic notes that Chinese is beginning to erode English's prominence in university curricula.

Sure enough, one evening last week when I started up a new course of Arabic classes at Berlitz, the only other student still at the center by the time I finished was a Lebanese teenager taking Chinese classes.