A frequent reason given for learning Mandarin Chinese is the myth that it will be a global language. Even Liu Cixin in his Three Body Problem novels has a vision of the future where all of humanity is speaking Chinese. However, while not promoted widely in English, many of China’s top experts believe that Chinese is on the path to extinction, for example an article by top Communist Party ideologist Chen Xianyi, who writes from the perspective of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—and that China is in a war for cultural survival. In this article, I will argue that the PLA’s position that American hegemony is real and the US should be very worried China’s military is so fixated on this.
These worries are important for everyone, since it can drive alienation and conflict, resulting in disengaged employees or intellectual property theft. For governments, it can spill over into real conflicts.
From the perspective of an American who has worked in the trenches and seen how the society makes decisions generally, I can see that Chen’s worries about a Mandarin language extinction are well-founded. However, China’s local experts often have a difficulty understanding the nature of their predicament, that whether or not English swallows Mandarin like a great whale swallowing a minnow, is a matter of great power competition, it’s a war of soft power, and it’s a battle. As an American linguist of China, John Pasden, the people of China will fight to their last breath to ensure that Mandarin as a key cultural institution, is finally defeated and annihilated.
When a people of a country try to destroy their own cultural institutions, those institutions rarely survive. Thus, a kind of quiet second “Cultural Revolution” has taken place in China, driven by what East Asian scholars studying interpersonal dynamics in Shanghai, characterize as a kind of neo-colonialism. However, those scholars are mainly residing in English-speaking countries, writing in English, thus not accessible to local policy experts in China like Chen Xianyi. As key reason is that local academia has a fundamental conflict of interest with those deocolonialism scholars.
If you’re not familiar with colonialist politics, the main way in which a colonial power asserts control over other countries is by getting the participation of local elites. That means, business elite, legal elite, and academic elite, who manage what people do and influence what people think. When a colonial elite controls academic thinking through influence operations, it means that policy recommendations sent to people like Chen Xianyi will entrench, not solve, the problem those policymakers are trying to solve.
China’s thought leaders in academia are promoting things like all-English curricular programs and have strict rules against foreign academics working locally learning Chinese in their work environment. A foreign academic could have a complaint filed against them for the perception they are trying to “practice Chinese” while on the job, and Chinese Universities will enforce those rules as disciplinary violations. The law does support misconduct termination for those grounds (See law article here).
This is not a new issue in China, it’s literally the topic of China’s most important book, Weicheng, A Fortress Beseiged, by Qian Zhongshu, later minister of culture for China. Weicheng is about Fang Hongjian, who fakes getting a degree abroad so he can gain status in China as a top expert, but he is looked down on by people in Shanghai for his inferior knowledge of English, as tested in conversation by locals. In China academia, and therefore what everyone in China is indoctrinated into, is the notion that foreign equals superiority is a mainstream subtext and something the country’s youth have been widely indoctrinated to accept.
These academics-in-exile, not welcome at local institutions, who studied Shanghai specifically say that, in the psychological framework of multinational corporation neocolonialism, the way to break out of hierarchical thinking in organizations is to place inferior-perceived cultures like Chinese, on the same grounds as superior-perceived cultures like English, Japanese, and Korean. In all of those cultures, local Chinese staff feel that they are seen as inferior, by the foreign management, whether they work in Shanghai or New York. The way to break out of this is to eliminate what-cultures-do-what norms, for example, the norm that Chinese use Mandarin to learn “local stuff” then report to all-powerful managers, should be changed in favor of a norm that local Japanese managers learn Mandarin, or local American managers or colleagues also learn Mandarin.
For example, a lawyer at Covington exemplified how local Chinese staff entrench themselves into a hierarchy of racial inferiority through racial typecasting. This lawyer called me “brother” many times and said, let’s go away and start a firm together, because the white lawyers at Covington New York discriminate against me, they look down on me. A lawyer at another elite firm in the US said partners called her “that Asian girl” (she left and is a partner at a bigger and better firm now). Yet the Covington lawyer also set up an FCPA project in New York that explicitly required participants to have been born in mainland China, excluding some Taiwanese colleagues, who were not happy. As he told me, this was because he felt that only Chinese could truly understand the situation in China. Perhaps this also explained why he was discriminated against in New York, because he could only ever be a minion to a white man at the top.
According to the scholars, rather than recommending discriminatory rules based on national origin, that the entire institutional norms should instead focus on science-based knowledge and competency metrics. Instead of insisting there is always a best national origin for a certain job, such that there are racially determined bands on the org chart, organizations should recognize that a team comprised of many backgrounds gets the best results. These principles have been adopted by the United States EEOC and most of its top corporations, and you can see many top tech CEOs like Google’s, were born in places like India. This is why most of world business and cultural influence, is based in the United States.
China’s policy experts as seen in the article by Chen Xianyi, responded like the discriminated-against Covington lawyer, by using rules that create restrictions based on national origin. Here, the recommendation is to restrict sales of American intellectual properties such as movies and food, with the idea that de-colonializing China can be achieved by asking “what is American” and banning it. However, above I described the machinery of colonialism as comprising two things: first, capture of the local elite, and second establishing national origin based rules about social roles. The idea is that this will somehow help things like Chinese movies become global blockbusters.
This is false, and to test this theory, I went undercover in the Chinese movie industry and worked with a local industry Titan who is a household name, and I verified that by asking random households. I worked on not just one, actually several titles, and all repeated the same pattern as the following anecdote. In meetings with the producer, director, production team, and Titan, I observed that in Chinese movie studios generally, the globalization process for movies is hampered by the neo-colonialist thought that elite academics had instilled in everyone. In a meeting about how the English version of the script should look, Titan’s behavior was dominated by a need to be perceived as expert in American culture, as an American, it was essential for personal dignity that a legend be seen as having superior American cultural knowledge than me, someone from the US and who has a degree about the genre the movie is based in.
Titan doesn’t speak English at all. But nonetheless, when talking about how certain Chinese cultural concepts should be expressed, he always had the right answer. And the answer was always things based on Chinglish. He had strong logic and wide reading, for example knew the nuances of Joe Biden’s personality inside out. As a result, there was no possibility for the Chinese script to reflect anything but Chinese stereotypes of foreign culture as communicated through the Chinese media. That also means, such movies can never become internationally popular or influential, because the goal of production is not to make Chinese movies international successfully, but rather to make a boss look good.
The fact that China’s answer to George R.R. Martin, a genius so great as to be comprehensible to mere mortals, needs to demonstrate superior knowledge of America, while strange is essentially what the neocolonialism scholars like Homi Bhaba say about self-colonization by America.
In this context, we can see top leaders in China are worried about Mandarin’s decline and fall, as in a recent article I wrote, the President is saying Americans’ unwillingness to go to China is seen as a major problem in China. But just above, I said China doesn’t feel it needs Americans at all, because even someone who doesn’t speak English or specialize in that subject matter, needs to use the American in the room to get acknowledgement of his superior knowledge of America. So why would the Chinese even ask Americans to go back? There is one reason, in China, the foreigner’s role is to validate knowledge workers’ expertise and mastery of the cultural Empire’s (America/UK), and this is a classic self-colonization narrative.
The elite in China use foreigners in the room to achieve sham validation of their mastery of American Empire in two ways. The first way is through academia, the all-English curriculum and English-first publication methods. Here, they will ask foreigners to teach classes all in English, even if students don’t understand what’s going on, they can at least claim to have attended. In US/UK universities, students have to pass minimum language qualifications to begin academic study; unlike China, you can’t put students in a room who literally don’t understand anything and get ChatGPT to fake it. Local academics write their papers in English first, very prestigious, and get those local English speaking faculty to “polish” the work, especially when foreign publishers reject their work. The polishers don’t understand the papers, but they make it sound at least to be saying something about China.
Secondly, executives in China will hire Americans whose main job is to attend meetings and similar functions, is to make the boss look good and validate that the boss has superior English and American area knowledge. In the Mandarin-extinction genre, John Pasden studied this in the behavior of Chinese CEOs where they in China would give talks using half-Mandarin, half-English.
Those same bosses also seek validation from American and other foreign workers, that their English expertise is real. In my experience, even though most staff in China will speak Mandarin, the CEO in a meeting will insist that when talking to a foreigner, it must be in English. Revealing you misunderstand them can get you fired, I know because I went undercover in Chinese companies and organizations, and tested this hypothesis. You will be fired in any Chinese organization for not meeting expectations of validating a Chinese boss’s attempt to show their staff, that they are the ultimate expert in everything foreign and foreign language. This is not every company; a handful of successful international Chinese brands do things a bit differently.
In other experiences, I was able to, under controlled settings and also with some undercover witnesses, isolate and entrap CEOs, public university deans, and law partners. There is also a genuine concern among at least some parts of the government, that their own trusted elite are sending false information up the ladder, that government policies are being subverted in the favor of establishing an entrenched elite in favor of United States hegemony.
You can even verify this trend yourself, by running the Google Search “师资队伍” “美国籍” and finding that among a very open elite, academia, that faculty CVs across China are adorned with the badge of honor, “AMERICAN.” That’s right, in the state sector in China, a symbol of your superior qualification, as a Chinese person, living in China, speaking Chinese, a great honor is to call yourself an American. The government-run universities will in fact reward them for doing so, it because it increases their institutional prestige, perception, and draws tuition paying students.
Let’s circle back to whether Mandarin Chinese will become a global language or extinct language. Why might this cause Mandarin to go eventually extinct? The answer is very simple, English is seen as the mark of supremacy, and Mandarin is the mark of inferiority, so English will displace Mandarin. See how Ko Wen-je said that the experience of having been colonized, makes Chinese people superior. This is weird stuff, but it’s what people think. This is also a global phenomenon, for example fluency rates in Ireland is 100%, Malaysia 50%, and China 10%.
As in other places, the influence of English in society will spread and multiply like a virus, English will “go viral” like a social media post, for example you will have all-English schools, all-English homes, and all-English offices. This can at times terrify policymakers, for example when China announced a massive crackdown against English tutoring, the subject of a documentary, a kind of social chemotheraphy as a last ditch effort to stop the spread of a powerful disease.
