The first paragraph’s topic was Led Zeppelin.

Several paragraphs later, after learning that the dean of international relations speaks Portuguese and is going off to Brazil, we get to the nitty-gritty:

“But the strongest evidence of Surrey’s commitment to becoming a global institution is in China’s rust belt where a Surrey International Institute has been launched with the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics [东北财经大学], one of the top universities in China.”

The penny dropped. This article was not about teaching the western world about China like, for example, the China Institute at the University of Alberta does.

This was an “in China” institute – not an “about China” institute. Surrey, rather than build its own campus in China like other western universities and colleges have, will have a partnership with 东北财经大学 and get the use of a building at 东大 where they will offer business courses. No mention of language here so far, though.

But Surrey does offer an evening course in Mandarin. So I wonder if in future we will see programs in Business Management and Mandarin to complement their existing language degrees in Business Management and French and Business Management and Spanish.

It’s worth keeping an eye open for new developments.

1.孫子曰兵者國之大事
sūnzi yuē bīng zhě guó zhī dàshì
Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.

2. 死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也
sǐ shēng zhī dì ， cún wáng zhī dào ， bùkě bù chá yě
It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

3. 故經之以五，校之以計，而索其情：
gù jīng zhī yǐ wǔ，xiào zhī yǐ jì，ér suǒ qí qíng
The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.

4.一曰道，二曰天，三曰地，四曰將，五曰法。
yī yuē dào，èr yuē tiān，sān yuē dì，sì yuē jiāng，wǔ yuē fǎ。
These are:
(1) The Moral Law;
(2) Heaven;
(3) Earth;
(4) The Commander;
(5) Method and discipline.

5.道者，令民于上同意者也，
dào zhě，lìng mín yú shàng tóng yì zhě yě，

6.可與之死，可與之生，民不詭也。
kě yǔ zhī sǐ，kě yǔ zhī shēng，mín bù guǐ yě。
The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

7.天者，陰陽、寒暑、時制也。
tiān zhě，yīn yáng、hán shǔ、shí zhì yě。
Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.

8.地者，高下、遠近、險易、廣狹、死生也。
dì zhě，gāo xià、yuǎn jìn、xiǎn yì、guǎng xiá、sǐ shēng yě。
Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.

9.將者，智、信、仁、勇、嚴也。
jiāng zhě，zhì、xìn、rén、yǒng、yán yě。
The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.

10.法者，曲制、官道、主用也。
fǎ zhě，qū zhì、guān dào、zhǔ yòng yě。
By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.

11.凡此五者，將莫不聞，知之者勝，不知之者不勝。
fán cǐ wǔ zhě，jiāng mò bù wén，zhī zhī zhě shèng，bù zhī zhī zhě bù shèng。
These five heads should be familiar to every general: he who knows them will be victorious; he who knows them not will fail.

12.故校之以計，而索其情。
gù xiào zhī yǐ jì，ér suǒ qí qíng。
Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:–

13.曰：主孰有道？將孰有能？天地孰得？法令孰行？兵眾孰強？士卒孰練？賞罰孰明？
yuē：zhǔ shú yǒu dào？jiāng shú yǒu néng？tiān dì shú de？fǎ lìng shú xíng？bīng zhòng shú qiáng？shì zú shú liàn？shǎng fá shú míng？
(1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law?
(2) Which of the two generals has most ability?
(3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?
(4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?
(5) Which army is stronger?
(6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained?
(7) In which army is there the greater constancy both in reward and punishment?

14.吾以此知勝負矣。
wú yǐ cǐ zhī shèng fù yǐ。
By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat.

15.將聽吾計，用之必勝，留之﹔將不聽吾計，用之必敗，去之。
jiāng tīng wú jì，yòng zhī bì shèng，liú zhī﹔jiāng bù tīng wú jì，yòng zhī bì bài，qù zhī。
The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it, will suffer defeat:–let such a one be dismissed!

16.計利以聽，乃為之勢，以佐其外。
jì lì yǐ tīng，nǎi wéi zhī shì，yǐ zuǒ qí wài。
While heading the profit of my counsel, avail yourself also of any helpful circumstances over and beyond the ordinary rules.

17. 勢者，因利而制權也。
shì zhě yīn lì ér zhì quán yě
According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans.

18.兵者，詭道也。
bīng zhě，guǐ dào yě。
All warfare is based on deception.

19.故能而示之不能，用而示之不用，近而示之遠，遠而示之近。
gù néng ér shì zhī bù néng，yòng ér shì zhī bù yòng，jìn ér shì zhī yuǎn，yuǎn ér shì zhī jìn。
Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

20.利而誘之，亂而取之，
lì ér yòu zhī，luàn ér qǔ zhī，
Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.

21.實而備之，強而避之，
shí ér bèi zhī，qiáng ér bì zhī，
If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him.

22.怒而撓之，卑而驕之，
nù ér náo zhī，bēi ér jiāo zhī，
If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.

23.佚而勞之，親而離之，
yì ér láo zhī，qīn ér lí zhī，
If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them.

24.攻其不備，出其不意。
gōng qí bù bèi，chū qí bù yì。
Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

25.此兵家之勝，不可先傳也。
cǐ bīng jiā zhī shèng，bù kě xiān chuán yě。
These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.

26.夫未戰而廟算勝者，得算多也﹔未戰而廟算不勝者，得算少也。多算勝，少算不勝，而況無算乎！吾以此觀之，勝負見矣。

fū wèi zhàn ér miào suàn shèng zhě，de suàn duō yě﹔wèi zhàn ér miào suàn bù shèng zhě，de suàn shǎo yě。duō suàn shèng，shǎo suàn bù shèng，ér kuàng wú suàn hū！wú yǐ cǐ guān zhī，shèng fù jiàn yǐ。

Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.

Two years after Jonathan’s piece we find a similar case in BC where Mandarin courses are being 100% funded by the Hanban. The courses will also be available online for free to BC residents. Dennis Pilon, Political Science professor at University of Victoria, believes it is “undemocratic” to accept or solicit money from foreign governments and that the “BC government was putting itself in a position of conflict”.

Click here for a Chinese version of the story.

Dennis Pilon makes an important point. So what about the ideological implications? What sort of curriculum might be expect from the Hanban? Presumably a modern version of what China has been successfully teaching to foreign students from around the world for over 40 years.

Mussolini and Fascism? I doubt it. How about Sunzi in Neo-liberal clothing – ie soft power? Is the Hanban really so different from the British Council?

Intrigued by Sunzi’s Art of War? Download the pdf or buy a bound edition from Amazon

But it may take a while. Becoming a global language is not easy. As Phillipson, Pennycook and others show for English, there’s more to it than just historical accident. The Rise of English is a political and ideological story (pdf file).

Fortunately, developing a global language industry involves more than publishing and marketing materials that promote spreading a language to every corner of the globe. The industry’s less commercial arm – conference proceedings and academic works – also examines the field critically. Articles like Marnie Holborow’s Ideology and Language: the interconnection between Neo-liberalism and English inevitably come with the territory – at least for English.

But if it’s no longer about “just language”, then will “language pedagogy” be different according to the language we teach? The titles of a recent TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) symposium – Locating TESOL in the Age of Empire, and of H. Douglas Brown’s paper, The Place of Moral and Political Issues in Language Pedagogy, is strangely inappropriate attached to languages other than English. How often does the theme of “moral and political issues” get raised at academic conferences on teaching Hanyu? It didn’t get mentioned at the last one I attended.

Pennycook, back in 1994 wrote

“the crucial issue here is to turn classrooms into places where the accepted canons of knowledge can be challenged and questioned”.

Some may disagree. And not everybody owns a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (nor has heard of Paulo Freire). But to see language teaching as involving humanistic principles where:

“introducing a cosmological perspective … for promoting ecological interconnectedness and spirituality to counter material and monetary interests that cause environmental destruction and militarism”

is an important goal, is (hopefully) not entirely controversial.

Textbooks, as pedagogical tools, rarely make their ideological underpinnings transparent. But it is usually History, not language learning, texts that receive the most attention. For Hanyu textbooks produced in China, though, censorship comes with the territory.

This is the sort of problem that presumably bothers Jonathan Zimmerman. Jonathan recently published an article in The Christian Science Monitor called Beware China’s role in US Chinese classes. Jonathan believes that an Advanced Placement (AP) course in Chinese Language and Culture offered to American high school students and that is jointly funded by the Chinese Government is a bad idea. He goes on to caution that Americans should study Chinese language – but on “our terms”.

As he puts it:

“The same regime that has brought us public executions, forced labor camps, and Internet censors will soon be funding a language and culture class in a school near you.”

“Given what we know about China’s rulers, it’s fair to ask what’s in it for them. And to answer, we might examine the last time a dictatorial foreign government tried to influence our language instruction.”

Jonathan is referring to Mussolini and Fascism in his last sentence.

Jonathan has a point. He believes that China will try to cover up its past crimes

But, (and, surely Jonathan is aware) language instruction, just like history, is rarely, if ever, a neutral endeavour. Being “influenced” is the default. For US President George Bush, learning Mandarin Chinese is important because it is critical to national security. For the corporate crowd it is all about “competing in the global marketplace”. Or, consider the link between teaching English and Christian missionary work described in Pennycook’s paper.

Any language textbook has the potential to perpetuate stereotypes and give a biased impression of the target language and culture – not to mention it’s history. And, clearly, there’s no shortage of agendas.

Sure, Hanyu textbooks produced in China will ignore the “3 T’s” (Tibet, Taiwan and Tian’anmen). And I doubt if the Falun Gong will even get a footnote. But let’s not forget that western textbooks that market English have been equally ideological in their portrayal of capitalist societies. More useful than good guy, bad guy narratives, might be to teach critical literacy skills that help us all to read between the lines, regardless of who wrote the text and in what language.

So how about the Language and Culture Course that Jonathan warned us all about? How ideological is it? Here are a couple of, presumably typical, extracts from a sample exam (traditional characters in the original).

聽說你考上南京大學了﹐祝賀你啊﹗
哪兒能跟你比啊﹐ 考上北大了。 真恭喜你。
你打算學什麼專業啊﹖
學醫﹐你呢﹖
做醫生太辛苦﹐我要學法律﹐以後當律師。

Here’s a quick and dirty translation:

A: Congratulations! I hear you got into Nanjing U.

B: No big deal! You’re the one that deserves the congratulations – you got accepted into Peking U.

A: So what are you planning to study?

B: Medicine. How about you?

A: Studying Medicine is too tough. I’m going to study Law and become a lawyer.

To anyone familiar with modern education systems in Asia – especially the elitist ones – there will be no surprise that our two Chinese students are discussing their future academic/career plans. And, in the context of an assumed affluent middle class, what could be more natural than being admitted to a top university to study Medicine or Law? Surely nobody, in this day and age, expects them to go off and “serve the people”!

As Jonathan predicted, these types of exchanges tend to “play up China’s economic achievements and play down its crimes”.

The revolutionaries amongst us may be disappointed that such examples don’t show oppressed citizens talking furtively about how to use a proxy to circumvent the Chinese Government’s censorship of the Internet – although needless to say – words censored by Chinese search engines will be missing from these teaching materials. Others might question which Chinese city these fictional beings live in. Certainly it won’t be Linfen – or any of the other 15 Chinese cities that rank among the world’s top 20 most polluted.

I certainly wouldn’t deny the ideological content of the above dialogue. In a way, it reminds me of the extracts from Chairman Mao’s Dr Norman Bethune in the yellow Chinese textbooks given away by the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa that I used to study Mandarin with in the mid-70s. Bethune was a model with valued qualities for others to try to emulate – he was 豪不利己, 專門利人 (absolutely selfless, only thinking of others.) Thirty years later the main difference is that students who are accepted to famous universities are the new models. And it is no longer the masses that need to strive to emulate the ideological ideals. This time it is only for the elites of the Me Generation. And, if Time has got it right, they also come minus the 豪不利己 – not to mention with a lack of interest in politics.

Here’s another sample extract from the course.

我帶你去參觀一下我新買的房子, 好不好?

This seems fairly harmless. I’ve just bought a new house and I want to invite you to come over and take a look. In a society where the home ownership rate approximated that of affluent western nations, we wouldn’t bat an eye. But, in China with its population of 900,000 peasants, sentences like these obscure the reality of the gap between the rich and the poor far more than they do in affluent western capitalist societies.

Are the above examples deliberate attempts by a “dictatorial foreign government” trying to influence language instruction? I personally doubt it. If anything, the underlying ideology is a neo-liberal one that borrows heavily from what Holborow calls “today’s strident global chorus of market ideology”. In the end, it may be neo-liberalism that is the common enemy. Peter Kwong, in The Chinese Face of Neo-liberalism, points out similarities between the US and Chinese economies – both are being seriously damaged by a neo-liberal ideology. Others, such as Henry Giroux, discuss how neo-liberalism works to limit democracy in areas such as higher education.

China’s “economic miracle” where capitalism flourishes without democracy may not be so special after all. As Peter Kwong notes, Ronald Reagan and Deng Xiaoping – the latter adopted free-market reforms thirty years ago – were both admirers of economist Milton Friedman – the father of neo-liberalism. So while the label of a “dictatorial government” for the CCP is appropriate, it doesn’t tell the whole story of China.

Predictably, Julian Edge was referring to teaching English when he said

“We need to look again at the materials we use in class and the worldviews that they represent, at the methods that we use and the interactional and learning styles that they foreground, at the choices we make in selecting the content of our courses, at the extent to which we teach a language of compliance to the exclusion of a language of protest, at the tests we use, to what purpose, and at the policy decisions we make in language planning.

How long before we ask similar questions in teaching Hanyu?

And, dear students, the topic for our next week’s discussion will be “Should we boycott the Beijing Olympics“?

我们下课吧!

The first time I heard 法西斯 used in a real context was some time just after June 4th, 1989. Three year old 毛毛 had just arrived from Beijing with her mother to join me in Columbus, Ohio, where I was finishing up my PhD dissertation. We were listening to a rally by a group of Chinese students. 毛毛 was sitting on my shoulders earnestly watching and listening.

打倒法西斯, yelled the angry crowd
爸爸, said 毛毛, with that innocent curiosity that only 3 year olds seem to possess, 法西斯是谁?
Not knowing how to explain such an abstract concept to her, I mumbled 他是坏人

And 19 years later, according to Michael Ledeen, 法西斯 is still alive. You can read a bilingual English and Chinese version of Ledeen’s article over at anti-cnn.com.

Is he correct?

我不知道. But I imagine that most people who thought that Ledeen was right wouldn’t want to learn Mandarin. And that would be a shame, wouldn’t it?

If your school is currently teaching, or will teach Mandarin, we’d love to hear your experiences, thoughts and opinions. You can contact hanyu.com here.

But is Global Hànyǔ really on the rise? Why wouldn’t we find hanzi on our ATM in the world’s most linguistically and culturally diverse city? Indeed, some banks give “Italiano” as a linguistic choice.

And, no surprise, the Economist is not convinced, either. Hànyǔ is so, er, so “unEuropean”. All those nasty tones and difficult and disagreeable characters are not worth the time and trouble for those forging a career path in that competitive global marketplace.

Right. Why learn Mandarin Chinese? English is THE global language. By 2025 China will have more English speakers than the rest of the world. Speak English, and you can go anywhere, including China (after 2025).

Nevertheless, something’s happening beyond 汉字 on your ATM. And playing the numbers game of how many people speak X or Y is only part of the story.

Predictions are English will soon be just A – not THE – global language. English may share that new role with Hànyǔ. According to TimeAsia, Hànyǔ looks poised to be a global language. TimeAsia’s not alone. Tom Foremski’s review of GlobalEnglish – “the leading Web portal for learning English”, raises similar questions.

Hanyu may be big business. Just think. Adventurous entrepreneurs could open a Global Hanyu language centre franchise. Who knows, a mere USD $350,000 – $500,000 investment in Chinese language education might have big payoffs. Your own franchise – CrazyHànyǔ? Hànyǔ First? Smith’s (or Wang’s) School of Hànyǔ? Hànyǔ Now!? Or even McHànyǔ. The possibilities are endless…But, until then, there’s always the Confucius Institute.

Our society and the global multi-billion dollar language industry – where “language” usually means “English” – could be transformed overnight, too. Imagine:

• TESOL coexisting with TCSOL. CELTA with CCLTA. The British Council with the Hanban.

• Bookstores with aisles full of textbooks aimed at helping 老外 acquire communicative competence in Mandarin. (How else can we compete in the global marketplace?)

• Teacher training courses to help alleviate the shortage of Mandarin teachers. Psst! An online TCSOL certificate, anyone?

• An influx of young globe-trotting native speakers financing their travels by teaching their mother tongue (sound familiar?). Oh no! Better watch out for the pedophiles and lock up your daughters.

• Cries from the elite to make Mandarin an official language. Mandarin lessons for your fetus. Calls to emulate the progressive policies of Panama, Zimbabwe, and the UK before we fall behind. And, of course, custom tongue jobs to help with those difficult retroflex sounds.

The academic arm of our emergent Global Mandarin (World Hànyǔ) industry might eventually have to deal with issues already faced by Global English (or World Englishes). But I’ll leave that for a future article.

Mark Glaser’s question: English Today, Mandarin by 2020?, is a timely one – especially when monolingualism is increasingly seen as an ideology.

So, while you’re contemplating the answer to Mark’s question, don’t forget to revise for your HSK— also known as 中国的TOEFL. And your offspring had better start that great toddle towards the future now. The word is out – “parents are teaching their infants Chinese to compete in the global economy“!

Looks like the 汉字 are on the wall. Better wake up and smell the 豆浆.