“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.
Chinese Law and the United Nations both Have a “Soft ban” on Foreigners Learning Chinese
At the request of Chinese officials, international organizations such as the United Nations explicitly ban native English speakers from serving as Chinese<>English linguists, which I confirmed with the UN last year is still a policy and saw UN documents making this UN International Law. 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.
The foreigner ban on Mandarin is also the policy and law in China. Let’s start with policy, which we can see by looking at what official propaganda says. 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.
If you search Google and make a list of all the organizations urging you to learn Chinese, it’s not Xinhua, China Daily, or People’s Daily, it’s all foreign Chinese language teaching organizations who want to make money off teaching you Chinese. None of these organizations stand to profit off you being successful, once you pay your tuition or buy the app, they’re done. China’s policy on the other hand doesn’t really want foreigners learning Chinese.
For hundreds of years, it’s been enforced law that foreigners not learn Chinese. Recall that the Qing Dynasty actually banned foreigners from learning Mandarin Chinese altogether up through the 1920s, a policy that has persisted to this day as a “soft ban” on learning Chinese with a “soft cap” at HSK6, the highest HSK level, which matches conversational but not professional Chinese skill. In the 1950s-1960s, Mao Zedong translator Sidney Rittenberg was imprisoned twice based on evidence he was a white person learning Chinese, thus must be carrying out plots against China. In 1994, the director of a Chinese language program was thoroughly searched for possibly stealing documents, then banned from re-entry, being replaced with a China-born colleague. In the year 2000, a Chinese language program using articles from the People’s Daily was accused by prominent academics of using Chinese-language teaching to infiltrate American ideology into China, specifically that Americans would share their opinions in Mandarin Chinese. (NYTimes) In 2016, the Chinese government published this image warning about the danger of Chinese-speaking foreigners, and I had a chance to ask the Ministry of State Security about it and the danger is specifically they are speaking Chinese while foreign.
In 2019, along with Yale’s Jeremy Daum, I was invited over to the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China for a conference on translation of Chinese laws into English, part of the rule of law initiative. Initially, the legislative staff were very confused, because the only two attendees who were involved with translating Chinese laws were myself and Daum. They thought we were English writing teachers for the Chinese-born translators. At a lunch in the cafeteria, where we were cleared to have lunch by building security, the Ministry of State staff with their super cool suits and secret service look, surrounded me and insisted I would need to leave the building. There was a misunderstanding with the building security clearance process, they thought the foreigners couldn’t speak Chinese, but Chinese-speaking foreigners are classified as a major national security threat so I was removed.
Subsequently, the legislative staff appointed a commission of experts to translate China’s laws, who were all born in China, and all of which said they’ve never translated Chinese legal documents into Chinese before. Not because of discriminatory animus, but rather due to official rules establishing that the role of foreigners is English teacher only. They did eventually ask for help with translating Chinese laws, in the capacity as English teacher only, as the law requires, but also said that the English would need to have “Chinese characteristics,” i.e. follow the English rules established by China’s regulatory commission on use of English, which officially establishes a China English where all of the law and policy words have a different meaning from American or UK English. This is not an accident, it’s the law, for example when US “Limited Liability Partnership” law was adopted into China, the legislative history says it renamed it to “Special General Partnership” in order to achieve Chinese Characteristics.
Most of China’s corporate capital is state owned, and it means those state owned organizations must also follow the China English regulations. For about 80% of China’s equity ownership in markets, a foreigner is legally not qualified for the job because they speak native English, not China English. China Eastern Airlines once experimented with foreign translators after China Airlines was embroiled in scandal for alleged racism in its English-language publication, but its native English collaborators were besieged for not using China English, and the initiative terminated. Only companies in China’s private sector minority like TikTok and Shein, are permitted to use native English, but these companies also emigrated their headquarters from China entirely because local China executive staff would make decisions that could sabotage their international development, and after Michael Spivey’s arrest in China, foreign executives began avoiding the country.
Let’s look at the website run by Yale’s Jeremy Daum, which is seen as very helpful in China for explaining China’s laws to foreigners. In fact, it could even be monetized in China to encourage it more. But his website is banned in China, so that’s not possible, and monetization outside US grants isn’t possible. The basic reason why a site like this would be banned is, it reflects the perspective on China that an American with near-native Chinese skill might have. This article on this site has been up for over a year, and read by plenty of people in the government, without being banned at all, because I’m just parroting the Chinese government’s perspective. CBL is after all, a translation company, parroting is what we do and we parrot damn well.
To make it even more clear these laws exist despite the radical experiment, at a Chinese University teaching classes on not English, I was told that speaking Chinese with students could be grounds for termination. Instead, lectures should be in English, even if the students say they are unable to understand what you are talking about and unable to develop any kind of job skill. There’s commenters from China on this blog who have said they are professional translators and can’t understand what it’s talking about. While they can focus corpus linguistics and semiotic analytics using big data in Chinese, which has easy-to-understand terms that make science easy to understand, even a native speaker of English will have a hard time following all that.
When the class was taught in Chinese for students, investment banks impressed with graduates came to campus, law firms said the work quality of local graduates was superior to foreign-educated JDs, and the United Nations ran a newsletter talking about how our graduates’ work was a technical monument to the heights talent could achieve. Why did the Chinese government put a stop to that? I talked it over, and had a conversation with the Dean, and they acknowledged, even sent messages, of the extremely positive outcomes.
However the expectation of Chinese law and policy is to restrict the usage of Mandarin Chinese at high levels by foreigners. Indeed, most foreigners with near-native Mandarin Chinese skills are banned from entry to China. The bottom line in local Chinese policy thinking is that, no amount of economic, political, or soft power benefit can justify foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese to a high level, if that sounds extreme, remember above how they arrested and jailed the foreigner of Mao Zedong’s highly influential works in solitary confinement for ten years.
To sum it up, China’s internal laws use several mechanisms to achieve a soft ban on foreigners learning Chinese. They are (1) prohibition on taking up Mandarin-language related employment in most of the economy and at certain organizations as law firms and international organizations (UN); (2) policy and propaganda urging classification as national security threat for speaking Chinese too well; (3) deliberately capping the HSK at low proficiencies whereas ACTFL and ILR have full proficiency levels.
China’s Mandarin Soft Ban is Smart, Ultra-Genius Geopolitics
In this section, I will argue that China’s soft ban on Mandarin was at least until Xi Jinping’s apparent reversal in 2024. It’s one of the most brilliant moves in the history of strategic geopolitics, a move so grand and devastating that the most brilliant minds on the losing side of this coup, mainly CIA’s Michael Pillsbury, could only pound the wall in agony, scream in rage, and cry themselves to sleep at night, and then spend the rest of their lives plotting revenge against China for having humiliated their CIA team so badly for so many decades. They defeated transformational diplomacy without the Americans even noticing.
The State Department and CIA of the baby boomer’s political era adopted a strategy of transformational diplomacy, the strategy of culturally transforming so many foreign states into an image of itself. When I took the FSOT many years ago, I had the highest score on foreign region competence of all takers, but failed on internalization of US organizational norms. Most US diplomats have poor super-critical needs language skills on postings. The goal isn’t for our diplomats to learn about them, it’s to make them become more like us. Learning Chinese is useless for budding diplomats, the smartest path is to learn finance, get a McKinsey job, because McKinsey literally wrote State’s recruiting criteria in a consulting engagement and Mandarin isn’t one of them.
To take a nuanced view of China’s soft cap on foreigner Mandarin Chinese proficiency in the frame of transformational diplomacy, one should look at official propaganda and state media narratives. Numerous broadcasts say that foreigners learning Mandarin up to the HSK cap are good because it proves foreigners admire Chinese culture and that China is good. HSK is capped before you get to professional proficiency. If you go above the HSK cap, you are a threat, a vector for foreign influence, or there to steal information to harm China. Moreover, China’s government had very legitimate and compelling policy reasons for taking all this action.
As revealed by Michael Pillsbury and several book authors on the MSS, the USA’s CIA had a long running program intended to transform China to a liberal democracy modeled on US norms, and until the mid 2010s thought this program was working. Having seen the fallout in so many African democracies, and later annihilation in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they were only more confident that resisting Western liberal influence is necessary. The propaganda narrative of Mandarin-as-Hobby-not-Job served to fortify public support for the Party by making China look successful and promising, while preventing foreign opinion on China to infiltrate the Chinese-speaking community.
China implemented a variety of legal safeguards not only in the Qing Dynasty in order to resist British influence operations meant to sell Opium to China, carried on to the present day. Developing the Chinglish language was deliberate, there was law mandating it, the explicit goal in English programs to resist foreign cultural influence in social fields. HSK was capped deliberately at HSK6, to prevent foreigners from learning too much to effectuate the CIA’s influence operations in China. This is also why Chinese students abroad basically have no contact with local students and don’t speak English with anyone; the local CSSA organizes segregated housing and community activities before anyone even arrives.
Universities have been a key Western influence operation to transform China, here too China’s government resisted whatever State and the CIA were up to. As a result, China could get western technical knowledge without infiltration of American ideology. The Chinglish students learned is fully accurate for engineering, but completely scrambles anything about politics, current events, law, policy, or other social sciences fields. That’s not accidental, there is a regulator that deliberately takes words from English and invents a new China English word.
In this context, bans on foreigners doing language services jobs with Mandarin for the United Nations or for most Chinese corporations, the trivialization of native English with an officially mandated China English, and classification of foreigners’ advanced Mandarin skills as a threat to China’s state security are all highly calculated policies that do effectively protect China state security. Beyond the soft ban, the country has developed a culture where Americans learning and using Chinese to an advanced level is seen as illegitimate by almost the entire population.
You will be targeted and terminated for using Chinese on the job, Even on USA Soil
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.
I investigated that lawsuit and the underlying issue was that a single white American out of the law firm’s approximately 30 Chinese-speaking staff, named Paul Dirkmaat, was hired for the role. Moreover, the filer of the suit and all of Dirkmaat’s colleagues felt that he had native-level Chinese skills. Nonetheless, the United States employer, apparently Wilkie Farr & Gallagher, in the judge’s words, because it would only be acceptable in plaintiff’s view to hire a white person for a Mandarin-related job, if there were no qualified China-born candidate. The fact that Dirkmaat had superior legal experience, technical skill, reasoning, and performed work faster than all other colleagues was irrelevant in an employment matter because the only criteria that plaintiff believed should matter is having been born and raised in China, and Dirkmaat was born in America.
Today, Dirkmaat by all accounts does not use Mandarin Chinese for work, and neither will you. It doesn’t matter if you’re qualified, if an employer has to spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending you from frivolous lawsuits because you weren’t born in China, then it doesn’t really matter what you can do. That’s as good as a law in America saying only people born in China can use Mandarin-language skills when doing work with China.
In my experience, at one point when I worked at White & Case 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 you wouldn’t even get hired by the company in China, the “scumbag”-screamer will be the hiring manager, not just someone complaining to a hiring manager or suing them.
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.
For China’s policy, people who have committed to learning about China and learned Chinese are an excellent captive audience to become English teachers for those $15,000/year salaries. They are people who know what policymakers don’t want you to talk about, and won’t rock the boat because they’ve invested a lot into China. Student satisfaction is higher because those people know Chinglish and can give face better. Their experience in China isn’t as miserable or isolating, because they can use Chinese instead of figuring out what broken English apps are saying. Someone who spends a decade learning about China and Mandarin, did not spend that learning tech, finance, or another useful job skill, so their other options might be a low-pay retail job. Even in companies with foreign staff who can speak Chinese, they’re all speaking English.
In fact, many Chinese learners of English in the United States told me they wanted me to help specifically find expert-Mandarin level speakers for the specific purpose of teaching them English. While this is the exact opposite of what science says works, it reduces perception of the difficulty of communicating effectively in English. Many English teachers in China deliberately adapt their English to speak Chinglish, also to reduce learner perceptions of difficulty, and therefore increase perceptions of their success. Overall this is not unlike anti-vaxxers who, based on pure intuition, are sure that all of science is wrong. This incidentally enhances China state security by delegitimizing foreign opinions of China; someone who understands China can communicate with Chinglish, proving that “foreigners don’t understand us because they don’t understand China.” Therefore, those foreigners’ mastery of Chinese does serve a real goal in English education.
In Chinese locals’ views, a $15,000 salary is a princely sum for anyone to earn, and no doubt foreigners would come flocking to those roles. To their shock and dismay around 2024, China policymakers learned that nobody actually wants to do this, and that there were around only 100 foreign students from the US in China, against hundreds of thousands sent to the USA. I think the explanation for why nobody wants to come anymore is fairly simple. It’s well-proven that the role China has for its Mandarin learners is poorly paid and has low job satisfaction, as your job as a teacher is to inculcate into students a completely false belief that Chinglish is true and good.
By contrast, look at how excited and committed the handful of foreigners helping with outbound propaganda programs are. There was one who complained on a blog that Chinese propagandists are falsely inflating the effectiveness of propaganda programs. Why would these American and British be so enthusiastic about China propaganda, but they hate Chinglish and vigorously attack it? An easy explanation is that they can obtain validation as to their language skill and professional ability, and that at least their recommendations about how to propagandize are true. That equals validation.
There are conversations by the shill/propagandists from the US and UK saying, “This is all Google Translate crap! It’s misleading! Nobody will understand it and it will look bad! You are not fulfilling your oath to the glory of the Chinese nation!!!” And the response they got back was, “None of this stuff matters! Nobody reads it anyway! Just do your job!”
So, this creates a really bizarre situation that you have all these indifferent propaganda people who know that their work has very poor impact, but just want to keep their jobs. Then there’s some people from the US and UK just begging to make Chinese propaganda great again, like it was back when Mao Zedong had a half dozen foreigners spreading his ideas around the world during the chaos of the 1930s-40s, but having been shut out once Chinese legal institutions reasserted themselves in the 1960s.
The difference there is immensely stark, with Sidney Rittenberg in the 1930s sitting at a table with Mao Zedong, exchanging views, translating his works that made Maoism a soft power phenomenon taken up around the world. In the past few years, when I was asked up to the National People’s Congress about how to do something with Xi Jinping’s rule of law ideologies, and the security staff literally escorted me out of the building once they learned I could speak Chinese. There’s immense hand-wringing in China about the lack of Chinese ideological influence or cultural exports, and this is a very advanced industrialized country.
Markedly, they’re underperforming what Mao Zedong had achieved at Yan’an with zero resources, and the difference is Mao Zedong would let foreigners sit at the table as collaborators and insiders, it was radical egalitarian communism where everyone is absolute equals, and race relations and nationality relations is where equality works very well. This is one of the places where Marx’s ideas are also accepted by all modern economists today, who think that business organizations with equality as to race, national origin, and gender perform better than those rejecting these ideas.
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.
