By Wendy Jasson Da Costa
China's official language, Mandarin, will be introduced to high school pupils at 16 schools in South Africa.
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told MPs on Wednesday that if China was going to be one of the biggest trading nations in the world it was important that young South Africans learn to speak Mandarin so that they could compete internationally.
Answering questions in the National Assembly, Mlambo-Ngcuka said those students who did well would have the opportunity to study for degrees in Chinese or in China.
She said it was also important that those South African graduates who could obtain an overseas education did not do so only in Europe and North America.
She said Chinese companies were looking for investment opportunities following the establishment of the $5-billion (about R33-billion) China-Africa development fund to assist Chinese companies to invest in Africa.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said after her bi-national commission visit to China the country had given its support to the partnership for growth and development project and had agreed that Chinese companies would be encouraged to work with South African ones in the fields of mining, household appliances and manufacturing.
She said agreements on co-operation were reached in several other areas, such as agriculture, and South African farmers were in China teaching farmers there to cultivate apples.
On Wednesday the deputy president was also asked how South Africans of Chinese origin, who had been born in South Africa, were classified "in our population" as they were not regarded as white, coloured or African.
One of the MPs said the Chinese people living in his constituency felt marginalised as they did not know where they stood.
"They are African in the past they were all kinds of things now they are just African and they are South African," Mlambo-Ngcuka said.