The China syndrome
LANGUAGE LESSON: With few in the West able to speak Mandarin, Michael Hickling takes a seat in a Chinese language school.
T’S cold but sunny lunchtime and the school park seems strangely busy for a Saturday. Parents unload their offspring and then follow along behind into the hall where there’s convivial mixing and jolly chatter. But this is not a weekend school social or sports event. The children soon melt away, heading for their classrooms and as the parents start to unwind, one set of dads hunch around a table for an intense game of poker. The Leeds Community Mandarin Chinese School, at Little London primary school near Leeds city centre, is getting down to its weekly business.
Jing Guang is its deputy chairman. He is a genial chartered engineer who came to Yorkshire to study for a post-graduate degree at Leeds University.
“I’ve been in England over 20 years – I’ve forgotten a lot of Mandarin,” he smiles. “We don’t have the equivalent of a mosque, so it’s also a place where we can meet and chat.”
The school initially catered mostly for academic parents like Jing Guang who had settled over here long-term and were determined to put their children through recognised courses in Mandarin (the language taught in the majority of schools in China) leading to GCSE and A level qualifications.
The Saturday school draws support from families in North and West Yorkshire and there’s even one from Manchester which comes over. Currently 126 pupils, from tots to teenagers, arrive here for lessons, split into two sessions over four hours, each Saturday afternoon.
At the end of their courses the children will travel to Prince Henry’s school, a specialist language college in Otley, to sit their exams. Financial support from Prince Henry’s and also from Leeds City Council dried up last year and the parents now have to shoulder all the cost. The fees are modest and the school’s organisers are keen to encourage people from any ethnic background in Yorkshire to sign up.
It could prove to be a smart move and a very sound long-term investment. It costs just £150 a year per child for everything – tuition, books and the hire of the premises – but the pay-off for the pupils could be huge when they start thinking about careers and realise they have a prized asset at the outset.
President Obama would certainly think so. He recently described China as the crucible of the future. The country will be the pivot of Asia as economic power shifts from the west to the east. You don’t have to be an expert to fall in with this world view – just look at the labels on the products you buy and the message is clear enough.
As a trading nation, we need to adapt to the fact that Chinese has become the world’s second most important business language after English. Speaking a country’s language confers a huge advantage on an outsider who wants to do business there.
But not many do, or are likely to, in the near future because provision for Chinese language teaching in this country is pitiful. There are only about 100 qualified teachers of Mandarin in the entire country.