Jane Orton has highlighted the decline of Chinese language education in Australia and her most recent findings are disheartening.
Out of more than 200,000 university graduates in Australia in 2015, just 4,500 graduated with Chinese language qualifications, and a mere 400 of those were not already native Chinese speakers. The number of Australian students undertaking Chinese language study at the year 12 level declined by 20 per cent between 2007 and 2015.
These dismal figures are in spite of education in Chinese, and other Asian languages, being a fixture of social and economic policy in Australia since the 1980s. Multiple education reports have presented the same arguments in the same urgent tone — that education in Asian languages is vital to Australia’s economic future.
Over that period, Australia’s economic relationship with China has indeed become critical to its prosperity. In 2015, Australia’s exports to China were over AU$100 billion (US$75 billion), comprising 35 per cent of Australia’s total exports.
With the take-up of Chinese language study diverging from the economic relationship, one might argue that language skills are apparently not a prerequisite for success in the Chinese market. Australia has done perfectly well in China with its stubbornly Anglophone business and government sectors.
An alternative explanation is that as Australia has become more economically reliant on China, the parameters of Australia’s relationship with the Chinese world have become ever more constrained. Commitment by Australians to Chinese language study is waning because it is a demanding and expansive vocation that falls outside of the terms in which Australia’s engagement with China has been cast.
The architects of reform, policymakers and politicians at the federal and state levels have zealously anchored the importance of China in trade and business. This defines the relationship as ultimately transactional, in which China is Australia’s greatest market opportunity — as it has so far proved to be.
The ardent enthusiasm among policymakers for the Chinese market sets limits on the political, cultural and subjective dimensions of the relationship. The value of knowledge for Australians of contemporary Chinese culture or its incomparable civilisational legacy is circumscribed by instrumental economic policymaking to its utility for developing market knowledge and facilitating business negotiations.
Similarly, the difficult moral and political questions presented by engaging with China’s authoritarian party-state are scrupulously set aside by policymakers and business leaders because they can only create potential hurdles to trade opportunities.
At the same time, this approach to China has been conjoined with Australia’s progressive politics. It is in China where Australia’s neoliberalism and progressive politics are reconciled. In institutional sites of progressive politics, such as education and cultural industries, engagement with China aligns with the political project to shed Australia’s colonial past and monocultural Anglophone hegemony and embrace a globally-engaged multicultural vision of Australia and a place in Asia.
This vision instrumentalises China as much as the politics of ’reform’. As a result, Australian institutions, especially its universities, have not been able to finesse China’s value for invoking a progressive vision for Australia. There has been little meaningful institutional response to China’s contemporary conditions of authoritarianism, patriarchy, environmental damage or ethnic discrimination.
Sitting at the intersection of both economic ‘reform’ and progressive politics, the realities of studying Chinese are not addressed by either of these socio-political impetuses. Chinese language learning as a non-native speaker is a vocation that requires an immersion in the politics, history and culture of the Chinese world. It encompasses life-long personal and professional relationships in China and spills into individual choices about how and why a student of Chinese language builds a life with China.
Chinese language learning cannot be sustained by an instrumental and transactional understanding of China because language itself is more than transactional. The immersion in China’s contemporary culture or its classical civilisation that language learning makes possible, and necessary, has limited market utility as a business or policymaking skill. The reality of China as an illiberal party-state, more than ever in the era of Xi Jinping, confronts the Chinese language learner with political questions that are not a comfortable fit with contemporary Australian progressivism.
The outcome is thirty years of policy promoting Chinese language education in ways that reflect the changing policy and political inclinations of Anglophone Australia but do not address the realities of learning Chinese. As a result, Chinese language learning has not made a breakthrough to become a normalised part of Australian education. As Jane Orton describes, Chinese language learning in Australia has atrophied.
Mark Harrison is a senior lecturer in Chinese at the University of Tasmania and an Adjunct Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.
It is unfortunate that the author of this post didn’t compare the current state of Chinese language study in Australia with that of any other Asian language.
Such a comparison would enable the reader to evaluate better such a sentence as: “Chinese language learning as a non-native speaker is a vocation that requires emersion (sic) in the politics, history and culture of the Chinese world.”
Is this different to the requirements of learning Japanese, for example, which also calls for immersion in the politics, history and culture of Japan?
If learning Chinese “encompasses life-long personal and professional relationships in China and spills into individual choices about how and why a student of Chinese language builds a life with China”, a student of the Japanese language surely faces the same challenges.
The real question is why large numbers of Australians are not attracted to the study of foreign languages at all, including Asian languages.
The statement that “commitment by Australians to Chinese language study is waning because it is a demanding and expansive vocation that falls outside the terms in which Australia’s engagement with China has been cast” implies that, before the ‘casting’ of the engagement, there was strong interest among Australians to learn Chinese. Learning Chinese has after all always been a ‘demanding and expansive vocation’, so it must be the casting of the engagement that has provoked the decline of interest.
Is this really true?
Perhaps there is little interest in studying Chinese in Australia because the Chinese have proven more adept at mastering English. Is there a core of English speaking Chinese diplomats and businessmen with whom Australian governmental and business leaders can interact effectively enough to limit, if not eliminate, the need for the Aussies to learn Chinese?
As someone who has lived and worked in Japan in the past, I can attest to how challenging it is to become fluent in a language which uses a completely different system for written communication. Even if one begins to get familiar with, if not masters, the huge differences in culture and societal norms, it still requires a very intensive investment of time and energy to get comfortable with the written requirements of the language.
Students don’t learn Chinese as it is a difficult language to learn. You have to have motivation to undertake the study of the language. Opportunities may abound for those who may be bilingual but people don’t see it that way when they are in school. The same applies to Mathematical Methods or Specialist Maths which also has seen falls in take up.
Perhaps the answer is that the economic cost/benefit doesn’t work out from the student’s perspective. Research on bilingualism in US labour market (http://ilr.sagepub.com/content/57/1/128.abstract) suggests that the payoff is pretty low.
Unlike alphabet-based languages like English, the Chinese language is performative or re-presentational in nature. To be proficient in this language, one needs to develop (over time) capabilities in recognising, writing, vocalising and acting out the scripts or characters. Here lies the difficulty in learning the language.
There are at least 5,000 of these characters in Chinese as opposed to 52 letters in the English alphabet. No wonder so many people do not try to learn Chinese! With its 1,500 characters and two other writing systems Japanese is not that much ‘easier’ as well.
What these results don’t evaluate, is how many people are learning Chinese but just not through university. The expense of going to uni simply to learn Chinese is not worth it. You could spend all that money on online tutors one to one and possibly be better in a shorter time than those at uni. People may not be learning language at uni due to this. Not to mention in the 21st century languahe classroom in Australia still havent advanced much. We still have to do things by rote, still have to pass exams based on a native speaker model which is problematic. And I do agree that students do have to ask political questions as well. And other commentators have also stated that this is with every country. I think China’s engagement with oz seems one sided. We need them more than they need us. From a student point of view: There needs to be some motivation as to why one would learn Chinese. Pop culture is one anvenue which has seen a rise in korean, though not necessarily in Australia but worldwide. Thats why Japanese is studied a lot it has animation, games, music, history, scenary, cars etc. Young people arent going to engage with Chinese if there is nothing relevant to them that crosses over.
Having watched the sharp decline in substantive humanities research in my own university, I think that Dr. Harrison’s point about an underlying instrumentalism in language education is spot on. China-based research and education are directed towards identifying threats and markets, with little interest in understanding China at any other level.
Such short sightedness applies in particular to language teaching, and the results are not hard to predict — a generation of China experts who are well trained in theory, but can’t buy a bowl of noodles without a translator in tow. Students see the priorities of the instritution and plan their courses accordingly.
“a generation of China experts who are well trained in theory, but can’t buy a bowl of noodles without a translator in tow. Thomas Dubois. You are right on the spot here, Thomas. As I wrote earlier, the Chinese language is a performative or re-presentational language. To study and master it, one does not only need to grasp it ‘theoretically’ but must also learn how to ‘perform’ ‘re-present’ or ‘practice’ it. To be proficient in this language, one needs to develop (over time) capabilities in recognising, writing, vocalising and acting out the “full-form characters (fanti).
In my experience at Sydney University and Australian National University, language courses were cash-paid extras, not FEE-HELP supported courses as part of a structured degree. I took language courses in my bachelor’s at University of Tasmania but have not been in a language training room since fee deregulation around 2003.
Matt is right. I have translated Chinese law for the European Commission but never been in a Chinese language classroom.
And of course the decline does not mean much if not compared with other Asian languages or against European languages. I imagine Indonesian, Thai, Viet, Korean and Japanese have also declined since deregulation. For example University of Sydney cut their whole Thai language stream around 2007 I think, from talking to a professor teaching there. I lived in Sydney at the time and had been studying Thai for 3 years but could not afford to buy a certificate even had they kept the stream running.
Equally worrying, why are 4100 of 4500 Chinese as a second language graduates native Chinese speakers? I’ve met a few of these background speakers in ‘good’ universities. I think they are a bigger problem than mainland Chinese international students gaming the system for easy credits.
Would be wonderful to have two streams of Chinese study, like English (literature) and English (as a second language).
The statement that “commitment by Australians to Chinese language study is waning because it is a demanding and expansive vocation that falls outside the terms in which Australia’s engagement with China has been cast” implies that, before the ‘casting’ of the engagement, there was strong interest among Australians to learn Chinese. Learning Chinese has after all always been a ‘demanding and expansive vocation’, so it must be the casting of the engagement that has provoked the decline of interest.