“The craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad” argued The Economist in 2007. The Economist found that China itself had policies and practices discouraging use of Chinese as a second language in economic contexts. Almost 20 years later, there is now a small crisis over the 80-90% drop in international students from America, Europe, and South Korea. A 2008 to 2018, up to 15,000 Americans went to China per year because business leaders said that learning Chinese would have great return on investment in business. Now that those alumni have reached their 40th birthday, they are telling prospective students that there is no benefit to learning Chinese, but prior to this article, nobody gave the precise details of why.
The phrase “we won’t let you foreigners steal our jobs” comes up over and over again. As in most countries, policy focuses on permitting “foreigners” to do only jobs “we won’t do,” and if the job involves using Mandarin Chinese, then it means a Chinese person could in theory do it. In this article, we’ll explore the specifics of why students think studying Chinese (or in China) is worthless, and why they’re right.
Current Events Background
Chinese policy expert Jia Qingguo in 2024 published alarming statistics showing foreign students from developed countries abandoning China, and recommending some policy proposals to help. (see The Diplomat)
Jia also made a number of very minor proposals for improving the foreign student experience, like access to Facebook. The idea of a “Foreigner VPN” and “Foreigner Purchase Apps” are fixes for big pain points. I’ve previously recommended that Mandarin Chinese itself be encouraged, something that Jia and other writers have pointedly ignored in all proposals. Among the educated elite, there is literally more support for re-establishing old British colonies on Chinese soil, than there is for encouraging Mandarin Chinese. Politician Ko Wen-je even said that the extent to which a Chinese person has been colonized, is a measure of their superiority.
These proposals miss the main reason that foreign student enrollment from developed countries fell 80-90%. Between 2005 to 2018, large numbers of American and European students were going to China to learn Mandarin because they were told it would lead to good jobs. Those jobs never materialized, in part due to Chinese legal mandates that closed such employment off to foreigners. But it’s also because places like the United States also have dysfunctional policies and discrimination related to foreigners.
Chinese no advantage for employment in the US/UK/Europe
Major US media publications around 2016 found it unusual and amazing that there was demand in the United States for lawyers who can speak foreign languages such as Chinese. Previously, the idea of second languages having significant economic value was considered something of a joke. Note how court interpreters are suing the US government on discrimination grounds because of their level of underpayment as a profession as a whole. For the most part, translation in the US focuses around the interests of highly marginalized, largely powerless immigrant groups who lack strong English skills.
Moreover, there is a notion of “cultural tax” associated with bilingual skills in the United States, that is, a person who is bilingual will be paid less (I.e. taxed) than a person who is monolingual in the same role. This is very much a discrimination issue as seen with the court interpreters, where marginalization and lack of social power result in inferior pay scales throughout society. While people from English speaking countries are very well positioned to learn foreign languages due to the numerous opportunities, just having the non-white association will put them back in the power structure.
There are indeed occasional job posts listing a preference for Mandarin Chinese or a requirement. However, those are usually from Chinese companies, particularly Chinese companies with a reputation for paying a lot less than American counterparts. Even among law firms with a famous China Practice that requires Chinese, every one of the Asian lawyers working in those practices I knew (dozens), complained of being discriminated against by the white-dominated firms.
In the private sector, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western Europe have acted incredibly shamefully by using bribery as a substitute for cultural skills with their foreign engagement. Excellent case studies are the GSK or Juniper Systems bribery violations in China, the “Siemen’s business model was bribery” scandals throughout the world, or the French Alcatel bans in Malaysia over bribery. Instead of making America’s case in Mandarin Chinese, America showed up with a briefcase full of dirty money.
Notably, there is no regulation or anything in the US government that would require an American Translators Association Chinese-to-English certification quality for public company, import/export, or FCPA matters. Corporate crime is much easier if those documents don’t make sense, so those jobs are outsourced to China. United States international law compliance also devalues Chinese skills by allowing companies to use sham language certifications, specifically the ALTA test, to support findings of “no problems.” The idea is that a company can have a fake Mandarin Chinese master sign off on that the company isn’t breaking the law, in reality they’re staring at documents they cannot understand.
What about Uncle Sam at the United States government? The foreign language related positions for China mostly hire immigrants and are considered low-status agency jobs. The reason is basically all federal government agencies require a security clearance even for highly mundane things, and security clearances disqualify people who have lots of foreign contact with China. Consider that Peace Corps alumni are prohibited from immediately going into federal employment which could use those skills, because they spent a lot of time abroad, which could undermine national security.
Now, if you spent a lot of time learning Chinese and in China, you’re probably going to be disqualified under those terms. Moreover, suppose you have zero foreign contacts conflicts, the translators in those agencies are mostly immigrants and are given a kind of second class citizen status compared to the real operators. Remember, the interpreters filed a racial discrimination lawsuit. Thus, the jobs aren’t really desirable anyway.
In the United States through the 1970s, students who chose Mandarin were often harassed and shamed for associating with China. America always rewarded the exact opposite behavior: Chinese who wanted to leave China behind and advance Anglo-American interests. America always partnered quite powerfully with the “ex-Chinese” in an effort to shape China in its own image. As Michael Pillsbury noted, America’s own so-called China Experts often hardly speak any Chinese. That would mean too much foreign contact, therefore a disqualification. America’s China Experts work from broken English translations, a perfect tabula rasa to project whatever image they want. Pillsbury noted in his books that whoever holds power in Washington, gets to pick what message is being projected through the government language complex.
Moreover, the domestic ‘white privilege’ phenomenon documented in the United States also has been carried on as a kind of global imperialism. Not just direct occupation and remodeling of countries like Japan and Iraq, but also soft power imperialism like linguistic imperialism. Most US embassies have a specific officer and program devoted to making American English the world’s language, and ensuring that greater privilege is associated with English learnings.
That program has turned out to be so wildly successful in China that local companies and institutions don’t want to consider having foreigners use Mandarin Chinese.
China never said Mandarin Chinese is or should be valuable
Moreover, at the request of Chinese officials, international organizations such as the United Nations explicitly banned native English speakers from serving as Chinese<>English linguists, which I confirmed with the UN last year is still a policy. I’ve met some of those United Nations linguists in China—ones responsible for the ban—and many of them simply refuse to speak Chinese with me. In conversation, they make it quite clear that someone like me could never be qualified to be using Chinese for any material purpose. I was told quite plainly, there is no place for foreigners using Chinese except as a quaint hobby. State owned enterprises have no foreign linguists on their payrolls, also pointing to an unofficial ban.
Is the foreigner ban on Mandarin possibly an official state policy? As far as I can see, the Chinese state has not itself devoted resources to advocating that Mandarin Chinese is valuable or worth learning for native English speakers. For example, this search of xinhuanet.com for “value of Mandarin Chinese” focuses on teaching Mandarin to remote ethnic minorities, war-torn Sudan, and Citrus Fruits. Therefore, the main propaganda line seems to be what the United Nations experts told me: Mandarin is not for you foreigners.
Recall that the Qing Dynasty actually banned foreigners from learning Mandarin Chinese altogether. For the policy to have evolved into polite unwritten discouragement of Mandarin alongside a soft power cultural promotion policy is a distinct policy. China has laws against foreigners practicing Chinese law, just like how the United Nations has rules against native English speaking linguists working with Chinese. China has universal English education, and bilingual jobs are seen as an elite position. The consensus also seems to be that foreigners are “unnecessary” in this field, therefore foreigners learning the relevant skills (Mandarin) is not something acknowledged or encouraged in the state media narrative. Behind the above China state media narrative is the implicit assumption that those bilingual jobs belong to Chinese citizens, otherwise the official narrative would be brimming with stories about how essential it is to learn Chinese.
You will be targeted and eliminated for using Chinese on the job
Once you graduate from your fancy Chinese language education and get on the job, whether in the USA or in China, there are good odds that colleagues will attempt to remove you from the role because they see you as “stealing our jobs.”
In one case, a Chinese lawyer in the United States sued American law firms firm for allowing white people to use Mandarin Chinese on cases, calling it discrimination. His theory, described in his patents, is that white people are fundamentally incompetent to use Mandarin Chinese in a work setting. Therefore, the law firms must have been giving special treatment by allowing Americans to work on Mandarin related documents. In reality, the law firms he sued only hired one white American and over a dozen Chinese-speaking colleagues, and the single white American who took his Chinese-speaking job (in America) motivated the entire lawsuit.
In my experience, at one point, when working with Mandarin Chinese documents at a big law firm a colleague I’d never previously interacted with screamed at me in the office that I was a “scumbag” for stealing their jobs. Fortunately, this was on United States soil and the discrimination committee came running. It couldn’t have happened in China, because China has laws against that sort of thing—laws reserving that job role to Chinese only.
Over the years, dozens of people told me, whether lawyers, consultants, or linguists, told me that they believed bilingual professional jobs beyond to them, not “us.” In another case earlier and many years apart I was working at one of the big consulting firms and joined in Chinese conversation with colleagues, and one of them filed a written complaint on wage theft grounds alleging I was “practicing Chinese.”
Tencent’s linguists’ 2016 failed North American launch many years ago was fairly similar; senior management ordered native English quality and a team of English natives was hired. Where possible, the China staff deleted their work and replaced it with their own Chinglish, in order to emphasize that no foreigner should be allowed to work with Chinese. They even sent nasty emails saying things like “you don’t understand China and you don’t understand WeChat.” Apparently, they were fired over it after bad media coverage.
China does not have any single uniform national policy urging against using Mandarin Chinese after you graduate. Rather, there is a disorganized mass of practices and policies that have resulted from individuals demanding institutions protect their individual interest against that of individual foreigners.
Instead, if you learn Mandarin, you’re going to be steered into an English Teacher or White Monkey job where Mandarin skill isn’t necessary or useful, being transformed from competitor to harvestable resource. Here, your role is to be part English practice opportunity and part corporate office decoration.
Your coworkers inside China are looking for English practice
You could consider looking for a job inside China that needs skill with Mandarin, and there are indeed some corporations which have people working in these roles. But the white privilege phenomenon in China means that the closer your association to white Anglo culture, the more you are valued, and a foreigner’s association with Chineseness therefore reduces the whiteness association, and therefore the professional’s value overall. White privilege is a very abstract and theoretical notion, so let’s talk about how it manifests in the workplace in China.
For the most part, coworkers are going to be looking for someone to get free English practice with, and in practice the English-speaking staffer is going to be speaking in English all day with colleagues. This will make the quality of their work a lot lower, because the quality of communication and teamwork is far inferior when a big focus is providing English lessons. The focus isn’t on business value, so much as it is having a white face and practice with English skills. Where American tech companies provided perks like ping pong tables and free massages, the Chinese company is providing a perk when it offers up a white colleague with which to practice English.
A consequence of not doing anything valuable for the company is that the market isn’t going to find great value in your participation. In the markets, this resulted in the so called “white monkey job” phenomenon, with the worker’s social role being seen entirely in terms of whiteness and additionally their compensation being fixed based on the value of whiteness in the market. You get a much higher salary than typical colleagues, but don’t create any value aside from a perceived association with whiteness. There is no room for career growth or success, and you are basically a glorified corporate perk, not much better than a massage chair.
International students know all about the white monkey futures awaiting them, therefore choose to stay away. Even if white monkeys make more than their Chinese peers, the difference is that their peers have a lot invested into their career development. A white monkey is a throwaway.
The devaluation extends to jobs where Chinese skill really is necessary, for example in localization. For example, TikTok is well known for offering American and even PRC technical staff up to around $450,000 per year, whereas Americans with native level (ILR4) Mandarin were offered $24/hour gig jobs with no benefits (around $28,000), moreover paid under the table, with no work visas and therefore some risk of arrest and deportation. This reveals how China’s organizations and policies value foreign technical know-how, but do not value skill with Chinese.
China’s official Thousand Talents Program was offering up to around $300,000USD for American technical workers. For near native level Mandarin linguists, the government media companies at the same time offered around $36,000 per year. Like TikTok, these were in expensive Beijing. US blue collar jobs in areas with low costs of living pay of living. Therefore, an American considering majoring in Chinese will typically be financially better off being a plumber or welder.
Even if you can speak perfect Chinese in one of these roles, everyone in the organization is going to want for some English learnings to go along with those business or technical learnings. The local manager who has great English is going to be the one making the $200,000 year salary, because good English is seen as a badge of talent. Chinese is not valued at all. The main value you’re going to pose to people in the organization is to enhance their individual sense of worth by increasing their English skill.
Translators in the US should just learn Spanish or French
You would think that Chinese<>English translation is valued more on account of the difficulty of the language and the shortages it faces, however, this is not really the truth. Of all the translated languages, Chinese is among the cheapest. A translator who goes to any of the major Chinese translation companies and wants to work for a big, multi-billion dollar Chinese company, will immediately have their rates slashed by 50-70% compared to what you could get with French. The same goes for per-word rates as it does for hourly rates; a French company will pay twice or more for French than what a Chinese company will for Chinese.
On top of that, you’ll likely be supervised and second guessed by someone in China who sees any non-Chinglish as evidence of incompetence. They’ll also jump on very ordinary, everyday translation mistakes like an omission or reversal, as evidence that you’re not fit for the job. Thus, you can expect to work even harder than you would with French.
American and European companies do have some demand for Chinese<>English translation, but at rates fairly similar to Spanish or French. Moreover, in isolation from a Chinese-speaking area (i.e., China), your language skills will atrophy over time. For the most part, over time, linguists I see in the US/UK are simply leaving the field. As your Chinese gets worse and worse, the job gets harder and harder.
You could reside in China and continue learning Mandarin there. However, you might be surprised to learn that China has extremely vigorous policies that make it extremely difficult to be a Chinese<>English translator there. John Pasden’s classic article, “This is China, please speak English” is a good account of what has been going on in China. If you have an interest in Chinese, then China isn’t the country for you and its institutional and visa policies will put up huge resistance if you try.
Chinese law and policy close the door on Mandarin language professionals
Translation in China like most places is done by freelance translators, not full time-staff. As a consequence, Chinese law makes it virtually impossible for foreign translators to work legally in China. Moreover, this seems to have been by design. As we saw above, protectionist sentiment designed to keep you from “stealing our jobs” shapes policies to exclude you.
Chinese government policy greatly emphasizes science and engineering disciplines and those companies. It also emphasizes academic rankings a lot, hence there are lots of foreign student scholarships for people who wind up leaving because they can’t get a visa. Aside from high income executives and tech workers, the visa rules in itself has a provision for English teachers native in English, but none for translators. A translator just getting started out is likely to hit a brick wall right out of the gates.
There are basically no sponsors of full-time visas for translators. If someone wants to work as a translator in China simply as a freelancer otherwise, they will be required to go through a whole host of very complicated and expensive corporate formation procedures along with complicated and expensive tax, accounting, and visa sponsorship processes.
Getting authorization to work as a typical freelance translator will run around $15,000 and include maybe another $2,000 in business filings per year. Moreover, the single freelancer category in Chinese immigration regulations qualifies as a “mediocre” business for work permits. Therefore, unless you are an incredibly good translator, your work visa is liable to be canceled for failing self-sponsorship requirements. In my extensive research, I’ve identified maybe five instances where I’ve ever seen a freelance translator/interpreter get a visa from China. Most acclaimed China experts and Mandarin linguists are arose outside China, because that is where China’s policies exiled them. Only if they get really good at Chinese and become bona fide experts, would they then qualify for the talent visa programs that would enable them to go to China.
Policies disfavoring Mandarin language is also reflected in China’s visa system as a whole. In the visa points scoring system, out of the 100 or so points used for scoring, the maximum Chinese proficiency is rewarded with a mere 5 points. The pay cut you get for having majored in Mandarin and not Computer Science will cause you to lose more points than that. Therefore, time spent learning Mandarin is actually penalized with a point system if you account for economic costs.
Chinese visa law very much enforces several xeno-stereotypes involvement in its economy: (1) Foreign Executive; (2) Foreign Technology Expert; (3) English Teachers; (4) White Monkeys. Even for highly expert translators, they are typically expected and requested to do English teacher tasks, specifically “polishing” broken English translations done by someone else, or providing content-based instruction English courses, where the content is translation studies.
China also has a set of very strong policies that creates huge pressure to transform China experts into English teachers, at a level that’s mind-bogglingly extreme. I have seen expert translators who translated prize-winning internationally acclaimed literature from Chinese to English working in China. How? As a condition for allowing them to continue studying China, something obviously hugely to China’s immense advantage, they are being required to teach English classes at professional institutes. The acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones a book about China, was given a visa to China, again, on condition he teach English classes. In the United States, towering China experts like this will be teaching classes about China, not doing a job they have no skill in and could have just been doing as a fresh college graduate.
I’ve asked about this, and was told they couldn’t teach what they know, because the translation-related teaching jobs were reserved for Chinese staff. Thus, the Chinese staff will be free to spend 100% of their time on their specialty, whereas you are going to be hobbled by splitting your time between being an English teacher.
If anything, this speaks to the immense discouragement China’s law and policy has imposed on learning Chinese in 2025.
Future Outlook?
In this article, we’ve seen the immense discouragement and barriers placed to foreigners doing work with Chinese. In summary:
- You’ll probably be disqualified based on ethnicity (UN) or foreign contact (USA);
- You will be steered into English teaching of some sort;
- Your employer could be harassed and sued for your use of Chinese;
- You’ll pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a business license to legally translate as a foreigner in China and then maybe shut down for actually working as a translator.
Chinese right now is a skill that is unequivocally a major disadvantage to learn, and primarily because both the United States and China itself discourages Mandarin learning. What the United States and China have in common is incredible enthusiasm for making everyone learn English. It won’t necessarily be that way forever, but I would say the following changes need to happen before learning Chinese is advisable:
- China state media publications widely acknowledging Mandarin Chinese has great economic value to learn for English speakers and value to China;
- USA regulation ends use of “sham certifications” (ALTA etc.) for foreign languages like Mandarin;
- A Chinese<>English linguist visa option;
- The UN and other bodies allow native English to Chinese linguists;
- “Mandarin encouragement” economic policies similar to encouragement policies for foreign executives and foreign engineers, and encouraging long-term near-native proficiency goals;
- US/UK/HK public company translations require ATA/CIOL into-English certifications.
