Why Mandarin Is Declining Even As China Rises

Mandarin Chinese learners have been on the decline for 10 years — who should be worried about that?

15 years ago, Mandarin Chinese was the language of the future. The US was still the world’s dominant economic and political entity by virtually any metric, but China seemed like it might overtake Japan to become the world’s number 2 power player. “China”, we were told, “is going to take over the world. Forget Spanish and French — learn Mandarin.”

As a politically nerdy teenager, I was skeptical of this prophecy. Japan made PlayStations, cool cars, and plasma TVs; China made cheap clothing. It seemed obvious to me that the China hype was a bubble that would collapse when everyone realised it was a communist dictatorship. Learning to juggle seemed like a surer guarantee of a job than learning Mandarin.

For the most part, I was wrong. China is unquestionably a superpower. While the other BRIC nations have largely failed to live up to their potential, the communist dictatorship running China has done a pretty solid job. What was once a cheap clothes factory with an army and a few skyscrapers is now almost single-handedly keeping the global economy afloat.

But I was right about one thing: Mandarin never really did catch on.

While Mandarin is the world’s most spoken native language, it still trails behind the likes of English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Japanese as a foreign language in schools and universities. On the popular language app Duolingo, Korean has overtaken Mandarin too.

In general, the popularity of a language corresponds to the political, economic and social weight of the countries where it’s spoken.

The British Empire and the United States spread English with gunboats and Hollywood alike; universities throughout the West maintained vast Russian departments and libraries during the Cold War; the Japanese economic miracle led to private school students in New York and London ditching Latin for kanji.

But China’s rise to global superpower status has been accompanied by a significant decline in the popularity of Mandarin as a language, and I think that’s unusual enough to be worth explaining.

There is a seemingly obvious explanation: China and the West are in a new Cold War, so fewer people in the West see a future career in China as a possibility.

But that logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. To begin with, Mandarin-learning has been on the decline since roughly 2013, long before relations between China and the West seriously worsened, and at a time when China’s economy was still growing quite rapidly (7% annually).

Besides, the ramping-up of tensions with China should have created plenty of demand for Mandarin speakers from think tanks, universities, diplomatic services, intelligence agencies, militaries and a wide range of other geopolitics-focused entities. Trade between the Soviet Union and the West was close to nonexistent, yet a Russian-speaker in 1970s Britain was in very high demand.

Indeed, Mandarin is also still in high demand. In major nations around the world, there’s a desperate shortage of highly skilled Mandarin speakers in the public sector — and China’s influence on global business is much bigger now than it was in 2013.

So why isn’t this utility translating into learners? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the reality of China’s quality of life.

The economic explosions that defined the post-WW2 world were in the US, Western Europe, and Japan. These were countries that were previously rich and industrial, had taken a hammering during the War, and then became great places to live by the 1960s and 1970s: clean, safe, convenient and democratic.

By contrast, China before the economic miracle was defined by insane dictators, heart-wrenching rural poverty, and fairly frequent famines; after the miracle, it became a nation of smog, chaotically planned cities, second-class migrant labourers and an increasingly sophisticated surveillance state.

The famines disappeared, and we should all be thankful for that, but China in the early 2010s was not a place that could offer the same quality of life as 1980s Japan.

My university operated England’s biggest exchange programme with China and quite a few of my friends spent a year in China teaching English or studying. At best, they had mixed experiences. When I asked if they would ever live there again, the answer was either “No” or “Maybe Taiwan or Hong Kong”. I had one friend who said she would be happy spending longer in Shanghai.

China has undoubtedly become more liveable since the early 2010s, but its quality of life still lags well behind truly rich countries, while the glamour and excitement that used to propel students to China anyway has mostly worn off by now.

Conversely, some of the more rugged aspects of China’s appeal have worn away too. 10 years ago, the isolation and underdevelopment were part of the sales pitch: go teach English in China, and you’d make good money while doing the bare minimum.

Schools were hiring Western teachers without qualifications; in extreme cases, schools were even hiring white people who didn’t speak English to teach it to kids. How would the dumb parents know the difference?

And if you didn’t want to study or teach, Chinese companies were hiring professional-looking white guys to show off at meetings to pretend their companies were more international than their competitors. Plenty of British and American men went out to China to fulfil fantasies of getting with easy-going Asian girls too.

But things have changed. China is cracking down on bullshit qualifications, and mediocre white guys aren’t impressing the local girls as much anymore. China mightn’t be as liveable as Singapore, but it’s no longer the fun Wild West either.

Interest in a country is usually the dominant reason for learning a language, although there are occasional exceptions; plenty of people have learned Russian, Arabic or Latin over the years out of religious or literary fascination. Lots of people learn Japanese due to a love of anime or videogames; others learn Korean for K-pop and the addictive dramas.

But China underperforms massively when it comes to modern cultural weight. Perhaps 5% of people in the West could name a modern Chinese book, movie, game or TV show, and fewer still if we exclude things like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that were heavily international in character. Even in Asia, Chinese culture is dwarfed by its smaller neighbours.

For the most part, China doesn’t seem to mind. It still wins over a lot of hearts and minds internationally simply by not being part of the evil colonial West. Its efforts to teach its population English have been relatively successful, with the result that the vast majority of people fluent in both English and Mandarin today are born and raised in China, not the West.

The people really losing out from the lack of interest in learning Chinese are therefore not businesses that can simply pay for translators, but rather China’s geopolitical rivals, who find themselves in the troubling position of knowing very little about China, while China knows a lot about them.

Whether we think of China as friend or foe, the rest of the world needs to get better at understanding China, and that requires more people who speak the language. In Britain, one of China’s loudest critics and a UN Security Council permanent member, only 41 diplomats speak fluent (C1 level) Mandarin.

That obviously needs to change — the only question is “How?”