A Peking University professor has been elected as a correspondent, or tenured foreign associate member, by France's Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the first Chinese associate member of the Paris academy.

Dong Qiang, chairman of the Department of French Language and Literature at Peking University, is a noted scholar, translator and literary historian and is an expert on Chinese and French culture. He has been engaged in promoting Sino-French cultural communication for decades.

Dong was to take office while attending the annual meeting of the academy this week.