The new Mandarins

National Interest, The, Winter, 1996 by Robert M. Pease

There are many young Japanese women with similar intentions at Yumi's language school. There are also students - teenage, college-age, and middle-aged - from around the world. A thirty-something husband and wife from Korea; a pair of middle-aged sisters from the Philippines; academic exchange participants from the United States, Australia, Europe, and even Russia. But when these foreign students pass in the hallways it isn't with the typical English greetings hello or what's up but rather the Mandarin Chinese ni bao (are you good?) or zenmeyang (how's it going?). For these individuals, like thousands of others in university and commercial classes throughout Asia, are betting that Mandarin Chinese will be the next business language of the Pacific Rim.

Will the economic transformation of China spread the use of Chinese language throughout the Asian region, as these students expect? Could the increasing utility of Mandarin erode English as the second language of choice in Asia? And now that the sushi, sumu, and karaoke crazes have subsided, is the world turning not Japanese but Chinese after all?

Despite the growth of Mandarin language instruction in Asia and elsewhere, these questions may still seem farfetched from an Anglo-American point of view. We have become so accustomed to English as the global language of commerce, science, and entertainment that no alternative seems practicable. English can be heard, read, and spoken from Buenos Aires to Brussels to Beijing, and it is commonplace to overhear a Thai and German, or Indonesian and Japanese executive conversing in English within the lobbies and lounges of Asia.

But commonplace is not always common-sensical. The initial momentum toward English as a global language was provided by two conditions no longer evident: the British Empire and U.S. postwar economic predominance. The language itself is a frustrating one to master through study. Compared to most languages, English uses an enormously large vocabulary. It has numerous phonetic and grammatical inconsistencies. As one Chinese professor in Beijing confesses, "I have been studying English for fifty years, and still I'm afraid of your prepositions."

Chinese is no picnic either. Spoken Mandarin may have relatively simple grammar and an economical use of words. But the reading and writing of 2,500 to 3,500 essential characters or ideographs is a daunting task even for native speakers. In any post office in China one can hear appeals for help: Hey, how do you write Harbin (a northern provincial capital)? Which is the Shan of Shantou (a southern coastal city)?

In many respects, however, computerization of Chinese will facilitate commercial functions, and the race is already on, among start-up firms and corporate giants alike, to produce the software of choice for the Chinese language market.

The english term "Mandarin" refers to the northeastern Chinese dialect that China's rulers have long promoted as a unifying language. Within China this dialect is referred to as "standard speech" (putonghua); outside China, it may be called "country language" (guoyu) or simply "Chinese" (huayu). Most Taiwanese speak fluent Mandarin, as do most educated mainlanders. Large numbers of Hong Kongers, who traditionally speak Cantonese dialect, are brushing up their Mandarin for post-1997 PRC rule. Similarly, business and cultural ties with China and Taiwan are reinvigorating Mandarin usage among the twenty to twenty-five million ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia.

Mandarin has always been the language of high culture among the Chinese within China and abroad. It is now becoming the language of pop culture as well. Taiwanese and Hong Kong movies, television shows, and music formerly produced in dialects, like Cantonese or Hokkien, are increasingly made for distribution to the wider Mandarin market. The international success of Chinese artists such as filmmakers Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern; To Live) adds to the allure of Mandarin among the young.

Until recently the designation of Mandarin as the world's most spoken language was mainly due to the size of the population of China itself (1.2 billion and climbing). But now Mandarin may be poised to spread beyond the Chinese world as a language of commerce and influence among the elite and professional classes of Asia. The economic impetus is clear: Trade within the region is expanding twice as fast as Asia's trade with other regions. And if reformist policies are sustained, the growing China market stands near the center of those trade flows. China could also become Asia's largest source of tourist revenue. In 1995 PRC citizens represented the third largest group of Asian tourists, a relatively new and growing phenomenon.

The potential for Mandarin as an Asia-wide language rests on historical as well as economic foundations. Japan, after all, was the major source of finance and tourist revenue in the region for two decades until its recent recession. Yet the Japanese language never did catch on. The legacy of the Second World War threw up some obstacles, as did the peculiarities of the language itself. More fundamentally, however, Japanese language offered other Asians access only to Japan, not the wider region. Japan is a unique cultural entity centered on itself; by contrast, Chinese influence has long circulated throughout East and Southeast Asia. Classical Chinese characters provide the foundation for written Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Korean languages. The Korean President Kim Young Sam has called for efforts to standardize Chinese character usage in East Asia, thus facilitating document translation and second language study. While Chinese characters no longer occur in written Vietnamese, spoken Vietnamese still contains a large percentage of Chinese loan words from the many centuries (111 B.C. - 939 A.D.) of Vietnamese tributary status. This means that native speakers of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese may find the study of Mandarin easier and more stimulating than that of English.