FEATURE: Northern outpost teaches China's common language

Asian Economic News, Oct 6, 2003

QIQIHAR, China, Oct. 1 Kyodo

When education officials from Beijing, Shanghai and a growing list of southern Chinese provinces gather here every chilly December, they do not set out for the nearby nature reserve or the riverside promenade -- they stay indoors to listen at the city's major attraction.

The officials, who come to this far northern outpost in bigger groups every year to recruit Chinese language teachers for schools in their hometowns, train their ears on the 200 students who graduate every year from Qiqihar University with some of China's cleanest standard Chinese.

They need talent from Qiqihar, an industrial city in Heilong Jiang Province, to carry on an unfinished task begun by the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong -- extending a common language to everyone in a country full of unintelligible dialects and mutated accents.

But unlike in Mao's days or even 10 years ago, recruiters now can go wherever they want to find Chinese teachers, and universities can train students as they like to suit the talent market.

Since 2001, the Qiqihar University Chinese Department has leveraged the reputation of northeast China's accent purity by admitting mostly local students and training them to speak as perfectly as possible.

Competing with classmates from nationally famous universities, all Qiqihar graduates who want to be teachers can find work in today's increasingly tough job market, university administrators say.

One China Central Television (CCTV) announcer and several provincial TV announcers, whose jobs require smooth Chinese, have graduated from the school.

''Their Chinese is better than the local dialect of Beijing. It's closer to a standard northern accent,'' said Yang Yumin, a personnel director with the Education Commission of Huairou District, a Beijing suburb.

Since 1994, educators from Beijing -- where some people talk with an R-based accent that other Chinese people find repulsive -- have attended Qiqihar University's December job fair, which in recent years has attracted about 150 employer representatives.

Groups from Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shanghai, all known for regional dialects, have also come to the annual fairs to recruit.

''Not everyone in China can understand one another,'' said He Feng, dean of the university's humanities college. ''We in the three northeastern provinces can't understand dialects in the south. In the south, there are some older people who don't speak standard Chinese. It's a question of north-south relations.''

Since Mao, Chinese officials have promoted the northern variety of Chinese, once known as Mandarin. No one is sure why the northeast got China's most favorable accents, but university officials speculate the trend began under the Jin Dynasty about 2,300 years ago.

Qiqihar University has in recent years assigned its 29 Chinese language and literature instructors a five-point program that highlights accent training, poetry memorization, three styles of handwriting and the meanings of 1,000 ancient Chinese characters. Teachers interrupt students who mispronounce words.

The program also trains students to be ''hard-working'' and ''down to earth,'' said Guo Hanzhu, professor and deputy director of the school's Foreign Affairs Office.

''This is a remote area, and the economy is not that developed. But if you compare the meticulousness of the students, they are more studious than those in Beijing,'' Guo said.

About 80% of the 2,800 people who have graduated from the Chinese Department since 1977 have stayed in Heilong Jiang Province to teach, but because the central government no longer assigns graduates to jobs, the stay-at-home trend is weakening.

Third-year student Lu Hongfan, who plans to follow her parents in becoming a teacher, looks forward to job opportunities in other parts of China. ''I should think of some cities I want to go to,'' she joked.

But Qiqihar must fight to keep its edge. Like students anywhere in China, some Chinese Department students would rather study English, study abroad or pursue Chinese masters degrees than take teaching jobs that usually bring in less than 2,000 yuan ($240) per month.

And northeastern Chinese do not speak with perfect accents, said Fu You, a teacher with People's University in Beijing. She said any Chinese university can teach people from any part of China to speak with standard accents.

''You don't necessarily need to be a northerner to be a teacher,'' said Fu, a Beijing native. ''As long as you can speak standard Chinese, you can be hired.''