Prince William ain’t seen nothing yet. His visit here this week saw Oxford at its most impressive: confident, colourful and critically sharp as a tack.

Speeches and ribbon cutting is one thing: serious intention and ambition another.

Oxford’s new China Centre is a gauntlet thrown down to the rest of Europe and the world beyond.

The world is changing rapidly, and Oxford is on the case.

This is not a time to look back, but forward.

Power is shifting inexorably towards the East. The West has to catch up fast.

Hong Kong philanthropist Dickson Poon’s £10 million gift to Oxford’s China Centre is evidence of this recognition.

China is rising, and we need to understand every aspect of it’s intentions, and success.

The UK’s relationship to the US is based on a trio of strengths: a common language, common values and recent historical wartime alliances.

But that’s so 20th Century. Now, the US looks to Germany and France when it wants to leverage Europe.

Our role – so peripheral to the EU’s centre – is a bridge, often crossed further upstream, or ignored altogether.

The USA will always be special to us, but we must now look elsewhere to forge alliances – trade, political, and cultural – and China is the new kid on the block.

Oxford is currently the leading centre in Europe for educating Chinese students.

In the mid-1990s, fewer than 100 students from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao studied at Oxford.

Now over 800 are here, and nearly 400 at Brookes.

So while its universities have an important teaching role, they also rely on Chinese researchers and academics to help advance Oxford’s world class research.

More than 140 Chinese academics are currently employed in Oxford University departments.

Many of Oxford’s schools have Chinese students, whose parents work in the city.

Mandarin is compulsory in several Oxford schools. Educational trips, school exchanges, specialist courses for senior civil servants and heads of universities: all this, and more, Oxford already delivers. The new China Centre in the grounds of St Hugh’s College will focus research on China’s expanding role in the world.

It’s a large brief, but the £21 million centre will include more than 40 academics, a large library of Chinese books (600,000) and provide a focus for Oxford’s students studying Chinese. I have visited the country, taken part in several university courses for Chinese delegates, and had the privilege of working with excellent Chinese interpreters and administrators.

Mandarin courses are offered in several further education colleges in the city, many in the evening.

Why not give it a go? It’s the language of the future, in which China will play a bigger role than we may imagine.

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