The year 2017 was a year of thriving exchanges and cooperation in education between China and Britain, said Chinese Ambassador to Britain Liu Xiaoming.

At a grand gala on Feb 7 attended by nearly 2,000 people, including Chinese students, scholars and heads from British universities, to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, Liu compared China-UK educational exchanges and cooperation to a symphony.

He said, first, the "main theme" of the symphony is loud and clear: Such cooperation enjoys full government backing from both countries.

In 2017, the fifth China-UK High-Level People-to-People Dialogue was a huge success, and the two countries also held the 10th China-UK Education Summit, he said.

With flourishing exchanges on all fronts, this "symphony" offers delightful "chords", the ambassador noted.

For example, the Oxford Institute of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences was established in the University of Oxford in 2017. This is the first time in its 800-year history that Oxford has let a foreign university set up a research unit on its campus.

And the Peking University HSBC Business School opened a new campus in Britain. This is a pioneering effort by a Chinese university to run a school in a developed country.

The cooperation on scientific research between universities of the two countries also has been greatly advanced by the establishment of joint research centers.

Also, for the first time, the publisher HarperCollins translated and published Chinese maths textbooks for use in primary and secondary schools in the UK.

And as of now, over 500 maths teachers from the two countries have been on exchange visits through the China-UK maths teacher exchange program, said the ambassador.

The "symphony" of educational exchanges and cooperation presents a "rich harmony" of mutual learning of language and culture, Liu stressed.

Currently, Britain has the largest Chinese student community in Europe, with over 170,000 Chinese students and scholars studying in Britain, while the number of British students in China is also increasing to nearly 9,000.