The Mandarin Offensive
Inside Beijing's global campaign to make Chinese the number one language in the world.
Ma Jianfei is the deputy director general of the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, better known as Hanban, and the map in his office chronicles his success exporting Mandarin around the world. The map shows that the hottest markets for Mandarin are Thailand and South Korea, where all elementary and middle schools will offer Chinese by 2007. Europe, particularly France and Germany, is also doing well,
Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it's the second-most-common language on the Internet. Now, just as China requires students to learn English, Beijing wants to make Chinese the must-take language for English speakers - and everyone else. Ma figures there are currently 30 million people around the world learning Chinese as a second language. Hanban aims to increase that to 100 million over the next four years.
Beijing isn't doing anything different from what the British or the Americans or the French have done - sending emissaries abroad to spread its language and culture. It's not the first time the Chinese have pushed their native tongue, either: In the 17th and 18th centuries, imperial China brought several Chinese languages to much of Southeast Asia. But this 21st-century push is more global in scope, as befits an emerging world power. "This is the linguistic equivalent of sending a person to the moon," says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Ohio State University and author of The Chinese Century. (Wired)
Here’s a conversation that happened a couple of months ago in my flat here:
Raph (OZ) – Hey so, tell me more about Confucius… He said lots of things.
Jeremy (US) – Confucius says, “Learn my language first, dammit!”
