China now has 475 Confucius Institutes in 126 countries and regions.

According to a statement released by the Confucius Institute headquarters during a conference organized by the institute in Xiamen, Fujian Province, there are also 851 Confucius classrooms in middle and primary schools across the world. The institutes and classrooms have provided education to 3.45 million students.

Established in 2004, the Confucius Institute is a non-profit institution which promotes Chinese language and culture abroad. There are about 100 million people learning Mandarin around the world, more than four times the number of learners than there were 10 years ago, the statement said.

Over the past 10 years, about 100,000 teachers, volunteers and managers have worked with the institutes, which have trained more than 200,000 Mandarin teachers in more than 100 countries.

Meanwhile, a plan to train about 30,000 overseas Chinese to be teachers by the end of 2017 were announced on Sunday by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council. Better curricula, improved textbooks and standardized testing are on the agenda, Qiu Yuanping, the office head told the third World Chinese Language and Culture Education Conference in Beijing on Sunday. There are more than 60 million overseas Chinese living in around 200 countries and regions, and there are some 20,000 Chinese language and culture schools outside China. But many schools lack guidelines and textbooks.