"Hong Kong houses are so neat/ Stacked so high above the street/ Twenty, thirty storeys high/ Tall and straight up to the sky/ Wind and rain can't knock them down/ Twinkling like fireworks in the sky. . . ."

At a kindergarten in Hong Kong's New Territories, a crowd of four- and five-year-old children are singing a children's song in Mandarin. This is one of the few kindergartens in Hong Kong where Mandarin is the language of instruction. But since the former British colony's return to Chinese rule, many Hong Kong parents have realized that if their children are to learn Mandarin, then "starting young" is best, so they have started sending them to kindergartens where Mandarin is the only language spoken.

Since the handover of sovereignty, Hong Kong people's interest in learning Mandarin has not slackened, but so far no marked improvement in their Mandarin skills has become apparent. Why is this?

A year after Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule, its people's strong interest in learning Mandarin Chinese shows no sign of slackening. Radio Television Hong Kong's Mandarin radio station Putonghua Channel, which was set up only on the eve of the 1997 handover, is attracting growing numbers of listeners, and according to a survey the station made this spring, more people now listen to Mandarin radio than English, putting Mandarin in second place behind Cantonese.

But to say that today everyone in Hong Kong can speak Mandarin would be an exaggeration. Especially among primary- and secondary-school children, the effectiveness of their efforts to learn Mandarin-in the words of Liu Rennian, a teacher at Seaward Woo College in Kowloon-"is pretty insubstantial."

Where's the beef?

Currently, only a small number of primary schools in Hong Kong teach Mandarin (i.e. standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect, and known in mainland China as putonghua or "the common speech," and in Taiwan as guoyu or "the national language"). There are also very few which hold their Chinese classes in Mandarin. In secondary schools, one or two hours of Mandarin per week may be available as an option.

According to Wu Fang-hua, a Mandarin teacher at Kiangsu-Chekiang College in North Point, the main reasons for Hong Kong schoolchildren's poor performance in Mandarin are that they have no strong motivation to learn it, and in an entirely Cantonese-speaking environment they have little opportunity to hear or speak it. "Back when there was a certain market for Mandarin pop songs in Hong Kong, schoolchildren could still learn some Mandarin from mass culture. But today it's different: Hong-Kong-style pop songs are the most popular, and children don't have any opportunity to learn Mandarin," she says.

Generally speaking, Hong Kong people only realize the usefulness of learning Mandarin after they complete their formal education and enter the job market. "The way Mandarin courses at various universities' language centers are heavily oversubscribed is indicative of this," says Liu Rennian.

At primary and secondary schools, pupils have to study many subjects. Mandarin is not a core subject, so they have little motivation to learn it. This forces teachers to lower their expectations and simplify their teaching materials. "From 1998, as Mandarin is included in the HKCEE exams, we will see if motivation improves," says Xia Xuan, principal of the Mandarin-medium Sun Fong Chung kindergarten.

Another reason for schoolchildren's poor performance in Mandarin is a lack of qualified teaching staff. To avoid hurting local teachers' employment prospects, the Hong Kong government has chosen to train Mandarin teachers locally, and with many teachers not yet trained, the promotion of Mandarin is making slow progress.

Some people complain that back when the Hong Kong government was implementing English-medium instruction it very liberally recruited foreign nationals as teachers, yet it is not applying the same policy to Mandarin, leaving many Chinese teachers from Taiwan and mainland China frustrated. But evidently local teacher's employment prospects are not the only consideration behind the Hong Kong government's recruitment policy for Chinese teachers: it also touches upon immigration policy, which is one of the government's biggest headaches. Hence it cannot be judged purely from an educational point of view.

The current situation for Mandarin in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools is that schools do not set their sights very high, and mostly adopt a "window-dressing" approach. "To put it bluntly," says Liu Rennian, "if a teacher says she can teach Mandarin, she will get the job. If teachers can't speak Mandarin well themselves, how can pupils be expected to learn it properly?"

Mandarin's day has not yet come

Both governmental and non-governmental agencies have been making considerable efforts to boost Hong Kong schoolchildren's motivation to study Mandarin. In the Hong Kong media one can often see reports about Mandarin public speaking and reading-aloud contests. One child who came top in such a contest said that studying Mandarin not only improved his ability to write in Chinese, but also helped his English-because the pinyin romanization used to indicate the Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese characters was similar to English spelling. Since Hong Kong's return to China, there have been many such news items promoting the "advantages" of Mandarin.

Kiangsu-Chekiang Primary School in North Point, which has always used Mandarin as its medium of instruction, has frequently been in the news since the 1997 handover. Principal Jeannie Sun Chow MBE says that learning Mandarin not only improves pupils' performance in written Chinese, as most people would assume, but the children also do better in maths and science. "Our alumni's HKCEE results over the last several years prove this," she says.

Does learning Mandarin really have this miraculous effect on Hong Kong schoolchildren? Early this year, a research report published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) stated that in primary schools where Chinese lessons are given in Mandarin, the pupils' standard of Chinese composition had improved, but they were more "passive" in class than those taught in Cantonese. Mandarin-medium teaching seems to mirror the problem of English-medium teaching, often discussed in the Hong Kong media, where "there is little depth to class discussion." For most Hong Kong schoolchildren, Mandarin seems to be a "foreign" language.

Many people see political motives behind the expansion of Mandarin teaching, and the group in Hong Kong most actively studying Mandarin today, apart from business people and shop staff, are Hong Kong's tens of thousands of civil servants. But schoolchildren are too young to be suspected of angling for a slice of the post-colonial government cake. In the same CUHK report, when children were asked their motives for studying Mandarin, over 70% replied that it would "help them to converse with others" and would be "useful for future employment," while more than 50% said that "speaking Mandarin is symbolic of our status as Chinese."

According to the Basic Law, which lays the ground rules for post-handover Hong Kong, after the transfer of sovereignty both Chinese and English are "official languages." But the Basic Law does not define clearly whether "Chinese" is Cantonese or Mandarin. Before the handover, the Hong Kong public worried that after it, Mandarin would rise to prominence and Cantonese would be suppressed. Looking at the current situation, thus far Mandarin has clearly not achieved such preeminence, and the Hong Kong government seems to be taking a very low-key approach to encouraging people to study it. In pluralistic Hong Kong, with its many different social mechanisms, the question whether Mandarin can be quickly accepted seems to beg the same answer as the one given by Chris Patten, Hong Kong's last British governor, on a recent visit to Taiwan: "A year is too soon to judge the success of 'one country, two systems' in Hong Kong."

p.95

How does the medium of instruction affect cultural transmission? No consensus has yet been reached on whether the purpose of teaching in Mandarin is to facilitate communication, or to strengthen traditional Chinese culture.

(left) Mandarin lessons in Hong Kong schools make use of the pinyin romanization system which is also used throughout mainland China.

p.96

This father, who was educated at a traditional English-medium secondary school, says teaching children Chinese is harder than teaching them English, and the Mandarin they have only started learning since the handover of sovereignty is harder still.

p.97

Pui Ching Middle School, which was founded over a century ago, is one of the few Chinese-medium schools with a reputation on a par with that of the English-medium schools. Its alumni include many outstanding achievers, including Nobel laureate Yang Chen-ning and Hong Kong Baptist University president Daniel Tse CBE.

How does the medium of instruction affect cultural transmission? No consensus has yet been reached on whether the purpose of teaching in Mandarin is to facilitate communication, or to strengthen traditional Chinese culture.

This father, who was educated at a traditional English-medium secondary school, says teaching children Chinese is harder than teaching them English, and the Mandarin they have only started learning since the handover of sovereignty is harder still.

Pui Ching Middle School, which was founded over a century ago, is one of the few Chinese medium schools with a reputation on a par with that of the English-medium schools. Its alumni include many outstanding achievers, including Nobel laureate Yang Chen-ning and Hong Kong Baptist University president Daniel Tse CBE.