Why fewer people want to learn Mandarin

On teaching Chinese in the Age of Tedium by Catherine Churchman 龔雅華

I first discovered this article in China Heritage, part of its ongoing series, Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, under the subheading, ‘Why Is Chinese So Boring?’

With that title, I had no choice but to dive in!

What I found was a highly entertaining and thoughtful meditation on the unique challenges and limitations of teaching (and learning) Chinese; an article I often return to as a guilty pleasure when I’m feeling depressed about learning Chinese.

It’s by Catherine Churchman 龔雅華, a historian, linguist and artist, who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

I loved it so much, I used it for inspiration in this article I wrote about the laughable state of Mandarin education in the country where I live, the UK.

Although New Zealand and the UK are thousands of miles apart geographically, the failure of both countries to promote and teach Mandarin in an engaging and interesting way is remarkably close.

It resonated with me, so with Catherine’s permission, and with the permission of China Heritage Editor, Geremie R. Barmé, I am republishing this article in full here on RealTime Mandarin for your enjoyment.

The concluding notes from Catherine at the end, on how to make learning Chinese “fun again” are very much aligned with what our mission is.

So, enjoy!

Andrew Methven, Founder, RealTime Mandarin

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Why fewer people want to learn Mandarin

On teaching Chinese in the Age of Tedium

Last week, a Channel News Asia article appeared discussing the reasons behind the lack of interest in learning Mandarin in New Zealand. There has been a decrease in interest in learning Chinese here over the last decade and student numbers have nosedived in the last five years, and this despite all the money poured into promoting the language through Confucius Institutes by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Chinese language education is in big trouble at all of New Zealand’s universities as the students dry up, as courses are whittled away one by one and as entire programmes are closed down. The aforementioned article blames the downturn in interest largely on a “barrage of negative news stories and opinion in mainstream media”.

Having taught Chinese to New Zealand and Australian students on and off for over twenty years now, I am pretty sure that this is not the only, nor even the overriding reason for the decline in interest in learning Chinese in New Zealand. I perceive it to be the result of a number of interconnected reasons — a clusterfuck in which the “negative news” about the PRC is but one ingredient. I shall attempt to unravel said clusterfuck in the following paragraphs.

Soporific traditional Chinese culture

As I see it, one of the main problems is that the Chinese culture promoted overseas by PRC apparatchiks is totally unappealing to the majority of young people. Soft power frequently acts as a “gateway drug” to deeper and more serious learning and inquiry, but the quality of the product being pushed by the PRC at the moment is not going to encourage new addicts.

Calligraphy and Peking opera and the “Butterfly Lovers” simply won’t cut it with the majority of people under fifty, and yet this is the stuff that is constantly trotted out to the world as “Chinese culture” for foreign consumption. This is not to say that China lacks a vibrant creative industry of musicians, artists, and writers. It’s just that most of the money to promote Chinese culture overseas comes out of PRC state coffers and passes through the hands of out-of-touch bureaucrats eager to show their fealty to Xi Jinping’s ideas of “Superior traditional Chinese culture” and “cultural confidence”. As a result, the sorts of things that might appeal to prospective foreign learners — the works of the innumerable musicians and artists who have refused to serve the narrow interests of the state, for example — are passed over altogether in favour of people waving their arms around in long sleeves or cosplaying as Uyghurs to recorded music.

This is itself a reflection of what has happened within the PRC itself over the last decade. The soft power potential of the cultural riches of traditional and contemporary China has been wasted and crushed into a dull pulp as a result of being forced to conform to the taste and ideological predilections of a unimaginative 70 year-old who pulls his pants up too high.

What’s the attraction for young people of a place where earrings on men and tattoos have to be blurred out on TV, or an entertainment industry where there are restrictions on depicting the supernatural, time travel, or the seamier side of life?

As entertainment produced within the PRC is obliged to disseminate “socialist core values,” even many young Chinese derive much of their entertainment from the illegal downloading of overseas TV and movies. It is therefore no surprise that people from outside are unlikely to race to consume the stuff that passes for mainstream Chinese culture in the PRC these days.

If one compares the interest in Chinese with the Japanese and Korean languages, both of these remain much more popular with young people, despite a decade-long effort to promote Chinese to New Zealand students. It’s about more than a faddish interest in K-pop or anime. The producers of mainstream popular culture in Japan and Korea are not held captive by their country’s official political ideology and are often openly critical of the social and political conditions in their own countries in ways that resonate with young people internationally, ways that also get them thinking and interested(consider Squid Game, for example, or the film Parasite).

Potential learners of Mandarin in New Zealand live in a fast-paced world of memes and a marketplace of ideas that changes with a swipe of a finger or at the push of a button; many have a finely tuned sense of irony and a good nose for bullshit and sentimentalism, especially when it emanates from the mouth of elderly politicians or cultural patricians. So why would people like that be attracted to a language in which all of the officially available entertainment is saccharine and sanitized, or which contains large doses of dull moral lessons and ham-fisted jingoism? Why would they be attracted to studying in a country where the apps that are the principal means of communicating with friends and entertaining themselves are banned? Why would they want to take part in a Chinese speech competition when they have to compose speeches on a boring moralising theme like “The world is one family”? Now, this last one could be spiced up in a thoroughly Chinese and thoroughly contemporary way by reframing the theme as “Will the world be one family when the Trisolarans turn up?”. But that’s simply not going to happen. The people in charge of promoting Chinese culture and language have succeeded in turning one of the world’s richest cultures into a total yawn-fest.

Teaching all the fun out of Chinese

So much for the unattractiveness of “official” Chinese culture as a hook for study, but how about the manner in which the language itself is taught?

Unlike other language programmes, the majority of New Zealand university Mandarin courses rely on boring textbooks the contents of which are at least twenty years out of date. These are filled with unnatural language and feature cardboard characters who have never heard of a smartphone or a rave and who still indulge in the antiquated pursuit of buying paper tickets on Beijing buses with cash. The disconnect with the reality of everyday life in China in these texts is not merely technological but is so far removed from what actually goes on there that it sometimes conveys unintended humour. For instance, the extremely unlikely scenario represented in the New Practical Chinese Reader (first published in 2002, the edition in common use dates from 2010) of a young women knocked off her bicycle by a careless Beijing motorist, who immediately helps her up and drives her straight to the hospital is darkly amusing for anyone familiar with contemporary social relations in the People’s Republic.

Teaching methods are often old-fashioned and the people teaching Mandarin are often native speakers of Chinese who have no idea what it means to learn it from scratch as a foreign language. Exposure to a variety of native speaker models is important for learners, but at the same time, learners need something to aspire to and non-native speakers can be a good example to follow. In my first year of Chinese at Auckland, I recall hearing the rumour that my tutor Michael Radich had been mistaken for a native Chinese speaker by someone who had been standing in front of him in a lift because his Mandarin was so good. Back then I thought “Wow, I want to be like that!”. Sadly, New Zealand’s own training of homegrown Mandarin teachers in high schools and primary schools has been discouraged from further growth because the task has been farmed out to native speakers — Mandarin Language Assistants — introduced into schools directly from the PRC, thus denying local learners of Chinese and Chinese New Zealanders the chance of employment. I would add, however, that there is an upside to the importation of Chinese teachers insofar as these people are actually trained to teach Chinese language to non-native speakers, and that in my experience at least some of them do bring the spark of unofficial China into the classroom despite their placement there as part of the strategy to “tell China’s story well”.

Disconnecting Chinese from China

Then there is the emphasis from those in charge of promoting Chinese in the PRC and elsewhere on advocating exclusively for Standard Chinese/Putonghua as the “language of China” rather than as being a language that is useful locally and internationally. Textbooks for foreign learners are almost always set in China, whereas I think that for beginners it would be better to set them in local context to encourage learners to use the language in their everyday lives (some New Zealand high schools are creating teaching materials like this). Mandarin is a language you can hear, speak, and read in downtown Wellington every day of the week, so why not learn how to speak about the world around you and talk to real people first, rather than memorising some stilted dialogue set in the imaginary Beijing of 2002?

Then there are all the other places in the world where Mandarin is spoken that are attractive destinations for young people due to their exciting and vibrant Mandarin speaking cultures of their own, such as Malaysia (think Namewee, aka Wee Meng Chee 黄明志), Singapore, and in particular, Taiwan. These other parts of the Sinophone world are frequently overlooked by teachers and textbooks alike, this is sometimes due to teachers’ political beliefs or limited experience of other Chinese-speaking communities in other parts of the world. Snobbish prescriptivist ideas also persist about what is “correct” Mandarin, the Chinese version of attitudes towards divergent accents in English that most Anglophone countries left behind in the 1980s.

The utility of Chinese as a diaspora language in countries other than New Zealand is also completely overlooked. Over the years I’ve used Mandarin to great effect in the mountains of Sumatra, in Poland and in markets in rural Laos, even when I was unable to express myself in the local languages. Disconnecting “Chinese” from the PRC and that state’s etiolated view of Chinese culture, and instead promoting it as both a local and global language is key to encouraging more people to take an interest, even if they may never travel to the PRC, as is making potential learners aware of the Chinese-speaking cultures that exist outside China or beyond the reach of the state. Detaching Chinese language and culture from the Chinese state will also diminish the effects of the PRC’s behaviour towards its own subjects and, in the international arena, on the popularity of the language and culture itself.

This brings us back to where we began, but with “negative news” about China as but one of the many connected contributing factors to the problem. Even if we allow this to be an important factor in the combination of factors that results in the decline of Chinese, it is not as if the PRC had no other choice to do what it did in Hong Kong or Xinjiang nor, for that matter, did it have to lie about the COVID-19 virus. If “negative news” stories like those have affected the popularity of learning Mandarin in New Zealand, whose fault is that ultimately?

New Zealanders have their heads where the Sun don’t Shine

Before I finish, I wouldn’t like people to think that I lay the blame for the lack of interest in Chinese in New Zealand entirely at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party. That would be entirely unfair, as New Zealanders themselves have also made substantial contributions to the decline of the academic study of Chinese over the past three decades. Particularly culpable are those involved in funding, legislating for and administering the tertiary education system.

Tertiary education in New Zealand has been underfunded since the 1990s, over the decades universities guided by free-market fundamentalism and political opportunism have been internally restructured so that only subjects with substantial student interest (or government protection) are able to survive. It is for this reason that Chinese has been on the way out in New Zealand universities since the early 2000s.

Chinese takes three or four times as much study to learn to the same level as languages such as Spanish or French, but university course offerings for Chinese have to be squeezed into the same three years of a university degree as all of the other subjects. For Chinese to be taught effectively requires many contact hours and small class sizes, but this comes into conflict with university bureaucracies (comprised principally of people who have zero experience of learning any foreign language) focussed primarily on increasing class sizes in order to make subjects profitable in a cash-strapped environment. The pressure therefore is for teachers of Chinese in universities to reduce contact hours and increase student numbers, but the outcome of such demands is that in order to retain students into higher levels (and thereby ensure these higher-level courses are not cut) the difficulty levels of the courses are being reduced to the point where free apps and online one-to-one tutoring begin to offer cheap competition.

Teaching standards could be maintained and course cuts avoided were Chinese considered by the government to be a priority language within the universities and protected as such. You would think this would be a no-brainer in a country for which the PRC is the largest trading partner, but targeted government support for Chinese learning is limited to exhortations of its importance once a year in the form of the “Chinese Language Week”, a tokenistic endeavour organized by a bunch of Pākehā, most of whom don’t know the first thing about any Chinese languages, histories or cultures, and still don’t seem to have bothered learning anything despite the ridicule and opprobrium they have received from local Chinese communities over the last five years.

Of course, there are other reasons that have very little to do with the PRC involvement in the promotion of Chinese culture and more to do with a generalised lack of curiosity within the Anglophone world about other cultures and languages beyond the superficial. There is a complacent belief that the West has all the answers already and that everything one needs to know about the world has already been translated into English, or that you can just hire a native speaker to get all your work done for you. Now that even the terrible inconvenience of having to learn a few words in another language when backpacking can be solved by simultaneous translation apps, why would English speakers bother to learn or find out anything? Perhaps they deserve what they get.

Making Chinese fun again

Although I am incapable of altering social attitudes on my own, and I definitely can’t fix the broken New Zealand tertiary education system, I can still make an effort to get my students interested and engaged enough with Chinese that they will be inspired to continue on to become proficient in the language.

I’ve been working towards abandoning textbooks altogether and replacing them with a syllabus of grammatical patterns, vocabulary and characters that can be easily adapted to real-life situations, and I have rewritten the dialogues from the imaginary Beijing presented to students in the textbooks to reflect situations that they might actually encounter, such as helping monolingual Chinese speakers find their way around Wellington or use the bus network.

I’ve rewritten texts to make a distinction between written style and colloquial Mandarin as it is really spoken, and I also make sure students know about the variations of Mandarin spoken in the PRC, in Taiwan and Singapore, emphasizing that these are legitimate varieties of Mandarin and as “correct” as the different accents and argots of English spoken in Australia, Ireland, India, and New Zealand. I tell them that they can learn more about what Chinese people think by getting to know people over lamb kebabs and beer on the side of the road than anything they are going to read or see in any official publication. If they really want to get a good perspective on what the Chinese-speaking world is all about, I encourage them to go to live in Taiwan AND the PRC.

As for introducing them to Chinese culture, last year instead of telling them about public transport in China I gave them a taste of Laozi instead, introduced them to the concept of wú wéi 無為 (I call it “classical slacking”) and its contemporary counterpart tǎngpíng 躺平. This year I’ll ditch the Shaoxing Opera mentioned in the textbook and feed them some HainaFromChina or Tzusing’s industrial techno … Experience has taught me that those two will pique some student interest:

Last year as a replacement for the “Cultural Note” on “Traditional Chinese paintings differ from oil paintings”, I showed them Lu Yang’s “Electromagnetic Brainology” 電磁腦神教 instead. At the end of the year when the student evaluations came in I was very happy to receive the following comment: “You should show more stuff like Electromagnetic Brainology”.

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Catherine Churchman 龔雅華 is a historian, linguist and artist, who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington.

Further reading: this should be read in conjunction with Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?

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