The Worldwide Boom in Chinese Language Study

Despite potential problems with the quality of teaching, in Germany at least, as long as you look the part with an Asian complexion and dark hair, you'll be able to teach Chinese. It's a similar situation to that experienced in Taiwan in the past, where many folks thought that any foreigner could teach English.

Like many Chinese experts, Professor R. Ptak, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Germany's University of Munich, supports the use of the traditional character system.

Since the dramatic acceleration of economic growth in mainland China, the Chinese language has become increasingly popular worldwide. Although the difficulties of both writing and speaking Chinese sometimes frighten off prospective learners, the huge potential of China as a business partner is a strong attraction. But it's not only businesspeople and university students majoring in Chinese who are taking up the challenge. It is generally recognized that it's never too late to start learning a new language, so a number of European countries have set up Chinese electives in their high schools, and the US education system is providing positive encouragement for students to learn Chinese.

Since 1994, the American College Board has seen fit to include Chinese in the SAT-II test (an important national standard test for US high school students headed for university), and there are plans to include it in the Advanced Placement (AP) as well. When students with this qualification enter university, they can go directly to Year III Chinese. The inclusion of Chinese, alongside the existing SAT-II languages of French and Spanish, has been enthusiastically welcomed by students who take this elective.

American high school students who want to sit the SAT-II test have to study Chinese for two to four years. The examination juxtaposes four different elements, including simplified and traditional characters, and both Hanyu Pinyin and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. The new SAT-II policy has resulted in an increase in the number of high schools intending to run Chinese courses to more than 2,400. However, sourcing qualified teachers and developing effective teaching methods pose a number of problems. If the trend continues, we may one day see Western countries establishing bilingual Chinese-English kindergartens.

The traditional Chinese characters meaning "Welcome" have been added to the entrance of Munich railway station, but many Chinese learners are confused over the difference between these traditional characters and the simplified characters that they study in school.

Watching these developments in the US, European countries don't want to be left behind. A number of experts have predicted that in the near future, Chinese will become one of the world's leading languages. Because of its inherent difficulties for Westerners, nobody would dare to predict that Chinese might one day replace English, but in Germany at least, Chinese departments in universities are becoming increasingly prevalent. What was once considered difficult and unpopular is now the fashion. Even a number of economics faculties are now offering elementary Chinese courses in order to improve students' employment prospects, and a few German government websites have added Chinese alongside the existing German and English pages.

Parallel to what's happening in the US, some German high schools and adult education colleges have started running Chinese courses. In addition, some of the larger companies are now including Chinese conversation programs as part of their staff training, employing teachers to instruct those who will be working in mainland China. As a result of all this activity, the demand for qualified Chinese teachers has increased dramatically, and there are now employment opportunities for Chinese immigrants and students studying in Germany.

Because China, Taiwan and Hong Kong are some of Germany's most significant markets, and China is Europe's biggest trading partner overall, the ability to speak Chinese is becoming a huge advantage in landing a good job. While the traditional European languages of French, Italian and Spanish are widely used for business, and of course English is still a required skill, all the indications are that those who have reasonabe fluency in Chinese are going to be the shining stars of the future job market.

German marketing experience in mainland China indicates that English is not particularly useful in communicating with the local businesspeople, with the possible exception of high-level management and some technical experts. If you can't speak Chinese, it's very difficult to work effectively. For example, how does one communicate with workers on the factory floor? English is simply not an option in a situation like this. You can communicate through interpreters, but that's a bit like "trying to scratch an itch from outside the boot"-it doesn't work particularly well. A reliance on interpreters also reduces the dynamic control of management because of the lack of spontaneity-it all becomes a little constrained. As a result, most big enterprises operating in China need fluent Chinese speakers on staff in order to maintain efficient management and remain effective in the market.

So how do these big companies find employees capable of both understanding and speaking Chinese reasonably fluently? First, they look for Europeans who can speak both English and Chinese as well as their native tongue, but people with these talents are few and far between, and tend to work in academia, not in the business world. Next, they seek out the children of mixed-race families who may have grown up and been educated in a bilingual environment, and as a result can speak Chinese at near native-speaker standard. As a third option, there are Chinese-born people whose families may have migrated to a Western country, and who have grown up with a good grasp of the necessary languages.

These options are regarded as primary because doing business with a foreign culture and employing people capable of operating efficiently in that culture always involves more than just language itself: there are the further factors of culture, race, customs, communication (which is not comprised entirely of the spoken or written word) and trust. The final choice for overseas employers are the local Chinese people themselves.

As a result, belonging to the group of second generation Chinese migrants is seen as an excellent qualification. If you work for one of the big enterprise groups like Siemens, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW or Bayer, all of whom have huge investments in the mainland Chinese market, then you can find yourself being promoted to a high position very quickly.

Examples of this are not hard to find. Stephanie Wu, the daughter of Wu Chun-hsiung, a professor who migrated from Taiwan to Germany, has been working for the London investment group Foreign and Colonial for less than two years. However, she is already the manager of a department and responsible for business in East Asia and China, even though she is just 25 years old. As another example, Cha Chia-yen's family migrated to Germany after he had finished elementary school in Taiwan. He got a job with Siemens and was promoted very quickly to become personal assistant to the company president, working at the top level of decision making in the group. Siemens regularly seeks out his opinions when making business decisions related to Taiwan or mainland China. He is presently responsible for Siemens' business in Taiwan.

The prevalence of Chinese is increasing to the extent that even students who study overseas after completing university in Taiwan are becoming popular as employees in Western countries. Taiwanese writer Chiu Yen-ming, for example, migrated to and now lives in the Netherlands. Her husband Tang Hsiao is the only Chinese person in his company and is consequently responsible for all business relating to mainland China. He is considered very important to the com-pany's success in Asia, and even during the economic recession, his position remained secure and he received great respect for his work. While it is true that overseas enterprises venturing into mainland China can find talent among the multilingual local Chinese, these people rarely have experience of life in Western countries. They don't understand Western culture, so their ways of dealing with problems and communicating with colleagues are often very different from others in the company. Entrusting them with responsibility can, and often does, lead to problems of various sorts.

The importance of knowledge of the culture, rather than just the language, can't be overestimated. In Western companies, it can be an advantage for promotion just to have a Chinese partner. Take for example Roland Gerke, the chairman of the electronics division of Siemens in mainland China. His wife, Yang Yu-lun, is Taiwanese. The company considers that although Roland isn't Chinese, his wife can help him in his business, so he has been posted to Asia for a considerable period. There are many other similar examples among Western companies operating in the region. Because of their language skills, Chinese can create opportunities for themselves and be promoted rapidly.

Because of the surge of interest in doing business with China, the popularity of the language is yet to peak. Therefore, whether for academic or business reasons, there is a need for some type of standard Chinese qualification. The HSK, which is sponsored by the PRC's Ministry of Education and the French Chinese Teaching Association, is presently the most influential system. "HSK" stands for Hanyu Shui-ping Kaoshi or Chinese achievement exam, which is regarded as the "Chinese TOEFL." In the past the main purpose of this test was academic, but recently the number of candidates from the business world has increased sharply, and it is estimated that presently around 50% are from this sector.

There is a Chinese saying: "Fengshui turns around"-good fortune does not always remain with the same person. Surprisingly perhaps, the time has come for Chinese to take its place as one of the major means of global communication, and now a good grade in the "Chinese TOEFL" will become the ambition of many Westerners. Isn't that a pleasing thing!

In terms of nationalities taking the HSK test, South Koreans are the main group, followed by Japanese and then Americans. These statistics also reflect roughly the makeup of nations operating businesses in mainland China. For large Korean enterprises such as Sam-sung and LG, HSK certification is as important as that for English, and this double is the basic criterion for finding a good job. The South Korean government even considers HSK grades in hiring public employees. Consequently, there are at least one million South Koreans presently studying Chinese. After the efforts of the last half-century to eliminate the use of Chinese characters when writing Korean, it is rather ironic that nowadays they are going back to relearn Chinese characters.

Although learning Chinese can be a wonderful and enriching experience, there are a number of unresolved technical problems connected with its teaching. To begin with, there are two different writing systems-simplified and traditional; secondly, Taiwan uses the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS) to represent the sounds, while the mainland uses the romanized Pinyin system. This doesn't create any particularly serious problems in either the mainland or Taiwan, but for overseas learners, it could result in confusion and even controversy.

Overseas Taiwanese schools especially are feeling the pressure to conform to mainland standards. Although originally they insisted on using the MPS system, many are now trying to teach both systems. Furthermore, the complexities of traditional Chinese characters make the simplified ones much more attractive to Chinese born abroad, simply because the latter are easier to remember and write. This has, to some extent, shaken the orthodoxy of traditionalists.

Fortunately, in recent years, the traditional system of Chinese writing has been coming back into favor in places other than Taiwan. Like a number of Chinese experts, Professor R. Ptak, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Germany's University of Munich, supports the use of traditional characters. From his own experience of learning Chinese, he argues that if you learn traditional Chinese, it's very easy to change over to simplified characters later on, while the opposite is certainly not true.

In addition, the traditional system is especially important in academia, where the ancient characters represent an accurate modern-day record of thousands of years of Chinese history and culture. Alongside the great beauty of the old writing system, the structure of the characters represents a logical system of thought from ancient times. Many ancient Chinese phrases and ideas will become difficult to divine using only simplified characters.

Despite these factors, however, simplified characters and Pinyin have become more popular. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, mainland China's economic growth has attracted substantial global investment, which means that the influence of the mainland is much greater worldwide. In addition, teachers and teaching materials from the mainland are substantially cheaper, so overseas students have easier access to resources using their systems.

In recent years, mainland China has put a lot of effort into developing and extending its influence overseas. In the US, for example, the mainland uses its political clout in negotiations with the Association of Universities. Their hope is that one day America will regard the simplified character system as the international standard. This is being reinforced by mainland Chinese teachers working in US high schools who are trying to improve China's image in the minds of young Americans.

Chao Ching-ming, who represents the ROC Government Information Office in Munich, is worried. Today, many Chinese speakers in the Western media and the academic world have a connection with Taiwan, because that's where they learned the language. Chao says that it is natural to have an empathy for the place where one studied. At the same time, however, there is talk in Taiwan about increasing the importance of Taiwanese at the cost of Mandarin.

Taiwan should not neglect the importance of being at the forefront of global developments in Chinese language teaching. After all, learning a language involves more than just the language itself: it has a cultural impact and provides the learner with a sense of identification with the place of origin of the language. Any such changes in Taiwan would have an enormous impact on the way in which the nation is regarded by other nationals. Taiwan has had the advantage of teaching Chinese overseas for quite a long period, and this lead needs to be actively maintained in the future.