China currently has a huge shortage of translators capable of rendering writing into perfect native English. The one online blog post that drew the most attention from potential Chinese learners documented that people in China were refusing to speak Mandarin with foreigners. Linguist John Pasden’s article Language Power Struggles documented his and others’ experiences with trying to speak Chinese with people in China and being turned down. In this article, I won’t go into documenting whether the phenomenon occurs, but just summarize other people’s experiences. Further, as a Chinese-English translator, I will look at whether this behavior as a social norm or language policy is beneficial to anyone at all. My conclusion is that such a social norm, to the extent it is adopted, would not just cause extensive damage to people who were in Pasden’s shoes, but also severely hamper China’s own national interest without making anyone in China better off.
Power Struggle Phenomena
Refusal to speak anything but English with the “foreigner” is a phenomenon that has been observed in many Asian countries, particularly in Japan, Korea, and China. These are three unique cultural groups, so the behavior is probably not an inherent cultural facet but rather rooted in recent history as influenced by the region’s geography. Pasden’s 2010 article on the subject is very informative and describes the conditions under which a power struggle can occur, along with providing tips to avoid it, particularly for people with relatively low educational achievements. In a 2019 update, he said it still occurs but his needs for learning Chinese are now much lower, thus he tends to let it go. In the Japanese expatriate space, frustrated foreigners made a video about people in Japan refusing to consider speaking Japanese with foreigners. The internet is also full of commentary about the refusal to speak anything but English in numerous Asian countries.
As documented in The Economist’s article False Eastern Promise there was also discussion of corporations and universities in China insisting that foreign staff not speak the local language at the time, with the rationale being that they can present an opportunity for staff to learn English, and journalists were told that these companies do not need foreign English speakers’ help. Many big voices, from The Economist to the Secretary of State, thus urged people to NOT learn Mandarin Chinese. A well known Chinese-English conference interpreter, wrote that, when in Taipei, she was confronted with an attitude that her Chinese would be useless, and that all English language needs could be filled by locals. The Economist in its 2020 article Why studying Chinese is in decline shows the public is following up on these beliefs that Mandarin Chinese is not worth learning.
Coherent motivations for the various language refusal or language power struggle phenomena have not been well explored. The most coherent unifying theory of motivation I can imagine is socially conditioned and subconscious expectations regarding ethnic social roles. Foreigners are steered towards being a source of English language study because it is the only proper social role that the steerers can imagine for them. The evidence that draws me to this conclusion is an examination of teaching assignments for PhD-level technical experts in China. I can find that people with extremely impressive credentials in everything from artificial intelligence to law, and even journalism, were assigned to teach classes in English in China. Some courses with a technical label were still fundamentally presented as a course in English. Frustrated academics said that the institutions claimed to “already have” people in those technical fields, so they were assigned to English. Pasden observed this issue all the way back in a 2003 article.
Pasden (and echoed in the writings of Terry Waltz) raised a potentially conflicting argument that those language power struggling against them do so out of a belief that their communicative ability is superior to the foreigner’s. I believe this is one part of the expectations as part of the ethnic social role. Specifically, the social role is that the foreigner is fundamentally unable to learn or use the language (until convincingly disproved). In about 1 in 200 interactions between foreigners and Chinese locals, blue-collar workers in China (for example, store clerks) will try and communicate using hand signals, so that there is a back-and-forth between hand signals and Mandarin Chinese. They are not using hand signals out of any sense of superiority, but rather because they have a very strong expectation that an outside ethnicity cannot learn Mandarin. This is basically the same situation as in the Japanese parody video referenced above.
A second piece of important evidence is the behavior of Chinese students when they study abroad, which shows low motivation to learn or use English. As numerous media reports and scandals have pointed out, such as the Duke University racism scandal, the vast majority of Chinese students studying overseas are spending their time in Mandarin-speaking communities and not really exiting that bubble. Language power struggles also occurred within this specific context and among this population. These people remain in the Mandarin-speaking bubble but refuse to speak Chinese to English speakers within that bubble because of deeply ingrained ethnic social role expectations. I interviewed a few people in this context about their motivation in this situation, and most said it was an unconscious reaction, so I would surmise that the behavior is largely subconscious and a result of social conditioning.
Chinese policymakers’ interests
Any discussion of Chinese policy should start with what the head of state and the head regulator, the Premier of the State Council, think about the issue. For that, they have very helpfully provided the state-run newspaper Global Times to let us know exactly what kinds of ideas are the right ideas. In More Americans Should be Encouraged to Learn Chinese, the Global Times says that, for Americans (and no doubt other nationalities), the extremely low number of people mastering Chinese is an enormous threat to bilateral relations. Since that article came out, a bunch of other English-speaking countries joined up to create the AUKUS alliance to specifically counter China. Note the marked absence of France and Germany. There is a huge Sino-Anglo divide in the world today, one which policymakers fear could spiral into a nuclear war. “Let’s frustrate foreigners’ every attempt to use Mandarin Chinese,” said no PRC Cabinet minister ever. But let’s look at what happened to those corporations after The Economist showed that no native English speaker competence in Mandarin would be needed in their 2013 report.
Around 2015, China began ramping up its corporate globalization efforts, in particular with the “Go Out” campaign. The major event in this campaign was the much-touted launch of WeChat and Tencent in North America. This was one of the biggest internationalization failures in corporate history, which you can read about in the MIT Review summarizing WeChat’s challenges as “lost in translation.” One of Huawei’s business document translation issues was so significant that it led to the 3-year arrest and detainment of executive Meng Wanzhou, according to the attachments listed in Huawei CFO Wanzhou Meng Admits to Misleading Global Financial Institution on Justice.gov. After getting a taste of annihilation on foreign shores, these big companies announced they would be hiring big native English translator teams, which Huawei showcased in a late 2021 video. A number of big Chinese corporations now realize that native English talent is indispensable to global success.
Too bad for them, a localization manager at one of these companies told me that there are only around six people in the world that they can find who will do that kind of localization work adequately.
The Right Norms and Policies
The social norm I want to recommend for pretty much everyone is that speaking Chinese be normal and encouraged in Chinese-speaking areas; language use shouldn’t be seen as a racial trait or ethnic social role. This need not apply based on territory, as there are English-speaking places in China and Chinese-speaking places in America. There is no reason that language usage needs to be restricted by things like territory or racial groups. From an economics perspective, I think this is supported by the evidence. Let’s consider the costs versus benefits of this policy compared to the alternative of insisting on ethnic social roles.
Based on past surveys, there are (or recently were) 72,000 Americans in China, most of whom are likely US passport holders from China. But let’s assume they’re all native English speakers since this is a very small number anyway. Surveys have shown that about 1% of foreign nationals residing in China have a strong interest in learning Chinese, so this reduces the number to about 720 native English speakers. Compared to the 1.4 billion people in China, this is 1 additional native English speaker to practice English with for every 2 million people. This is an incredibly insignificant number of English teachers to add to the total population, especially considering that Chinese-native learning of English is one of the worst-paid majors in China due to market saturation. Those “language struggle” people I saw appear around 2010, which I followed through LinkedIn for another decade to 2020, did not go on to have successful careers compared to their peers who emphasized professional skills.
Consider the other possibility for those 720 Americans who, hearing the glorious call of China’s wise leaders, decide to learn Chinese and do something useful and productive with what they learned. China has about 135 Fortune 500s, so this would amount to over 5 Americans per Fortune 500 company available to do things like website localization, product localization, and outbound foreign sales. While that may not seem like a lot, consider that there are only about 5 similarly credentialed people in the world doing localization from Chinese to English right now. That means that Didi and WeChat’s website front ends were done by an expert localizer (as seen in Laura Brown’s portfolio) in English so powerful that only a top advertising firm could match it. However, as observed by reviewers of these products, the English versions don’t really make sense and are hard to use.
The above is an argument that society benefits overall, but what if you are an evil bloodsucking parasite of a human? As I briefly referenced above, the people who engaged in “language struggles” with others did not have successful careers. Think administrative assistant or ESL teacher-level success. The people at the very opposite end of the spectrum, who instinctively treated the foreign speaker of English as a cultural insider, had the most successful careers. For example, one made partner at a Big 4 audit firm, another is a C-level executive at a big financial institution’s Hong Kong office, and another is a highly respected patent attorney. Each makes over $200,000 a year. Most, but not all, were interested in American culture and attended social activities held by Americans. A fourth is a senior-level manager just below the executive level at Alibaba, first in the US and now in Hangzhou. Moreover, they associated with multiple Americans who speak Chinese.
These successful case studies shed a light on some of the benefits that can be gained by interacting with Americans who speak Chinese, such as the above-cited linguistics writers Pasden and Waltz. In particular, someone who has spent 10,000 hours studying Chinese culture and has a strong idea of psychological, behavioral, and cultural models, would be able to provide useful advice and commentary on their own career (and social) development within the English-speaking realm. This makes a huge difference because a dozen critical choices can mean the difference between success and failure. Second, the English learned in China is generally a form of Chinglish not designed for social interaction and leads to a lot of distortion in social interaction with Americans. Moreover, the interaction is in the context of a “normal person” and not a “language learning resource.”
The “language power struggle” people are thus not having normal social interactions even if they “won” the struggle. So, they are not gaining useful social or cultural information, despite social and cultural information being much more useful than language practice. Thus, those who seek and embrace social and cultural information wind up becoming much more successful in the long run. The expectation of the people doing these “language power struggles” doesn’t make a lot of sense. If someone like Pasden were in China to learn Chinese, as he did in 2010, then putting pressure on this person to conform to a racially-defined social role of “source of English language practice” isn’t going to succeed—these people will just go away. Indeed, that seems to be what happens: they get discouraged and look at other options.
Conclusion
There are too few Chinese translators with a native command of English doing localization for local China products. This makes it extremely difficult for Chinese brands to effectively sell abroad. The primary bottleneck seems to be that native English learners of Chinese are given a pre-defined ethnic-social role as being a source of English language practice. They are being discouraged from non-conforming roles by a sizeable minority of people in China. This situation could be turned around by adopting a policy and social norm of encouraging interested persons to learn Mandarin Chinese, which would help develop a sizeable talent pool that could enable Chinese product internationalization.
