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Everything Changes
To quote the Buddha: “Whatever has the nature of arising has the nature of ceasing”. Or in other words, everything changes, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Whether we want to or not.
I’ve argued elsewhere that the notion of claiming Chinese or any other language to be the oldest language in the world is pure nonsense. For the reason that everything changes.
Modern Chinese would be Unrecognizable to Past Speakers
A modern citizen of Shanghai or Taipei would hardly be able to understand a speaker of 1st century BCE Old Chinese. This was way before any tones developed and there were many sounds allowed that modern speakers would struggle to pronounce. I’d wager that even Middle Chinese from a thousand years ago would be more or less unintelligible to most modern Chinese people without specialized training in that specific subject.
Rubbing of a Zhou dynasty bronze inscription, c. 825 BCE
Modern China would be Unrecognizable to Past Citizens
What’s true about the change of languages is also true for everything else. From what I understand, when we ask how old a country is we run into similar problems to what we would when we ask how old a language is. Because everything changes. What starts of as a confederacy unifies into a state, breaks up through civil war, unifies as new countries, which then get invaded by a larger empire, breaks away when that empire falls, and so on. Even if what comes out on the other side calls itself the same name as that original state, is it the same?
Some kind of Persisting Social Cohesion
However we define these things, China, in one form or the other, has been around for at least 3000 years.
Dynastic Timeline of the History of China
For most of its history, China didn’t call itself 中國, instead, it defined itself by the name of the dynasty ruling at the time. The earliest such name mentioned is Xià (夏朝), followed by Shāng (商朝) in the Second Millennium BCE. Even though the reality is much more complex, we can in this manner, very crudely, describe the history of China as a string of dynasties, one giving way to another all the way up to the formation of the modern Chinese state.
The Evolution of the Chinese Languages — A Tree with Many Branches
The history of the Chinese language is not as linear as the history of China, since it’s easier that languages get broken up into distinct dialects without getting reunified.
Historical linguists have worked tirelessly on the Herculean feat to piece together the history of the Chinese language family. A full description of this fascinating story will require an article series of its own. An overview can look something like this:
Timeline of the Chinese Languages as a Branching Tree
From the Chinese state’s point of view, they have solved this problem by consolidating the writing system, so that speakers of otherwise mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects (languages) can understand each other in writing. In fact, the prestige variety we today call Classical Chinese was a written and not a spoken standard. More on that later.
Just listing the current dialects and varieties of Chinese turns out to be a time-consuming and difficult project. Different censuses routinely turn out hundreds of local varieties. I’ll do my best to be brief.
In that spirit, these are the major Chinese dialects spoken today:
- 普通話 (pǔtōng huà) — Standard Mandarin (Beijing Dialect)
- 粵語 (yuè yǔ) — Yue (Cantonese)
- 閩語 (mǐn yǔ) — Min (Hokkien-Taiwanese)
- 吳語 (wú yǔ) — Wu (Shanghainese)
- 徽語 (huī yǔ) — Hui (sometimes classified as Mandarin, Wu, or even Gan)
- 客家話 (kè jiā huà) — Hakka (spoken by a significant number of Taiwan natives)
- 湘語 (xiāng yǔ) — Xiang (Hunanese, spoken by Mao Zedong)
- 晉語 (jìn yǔ) — Jin (sometimes considered a dialect of Mandarin)
- 贛語 (gàn yǔ) — Gan (sometimes classified as a variety of Hakka)
List of Chinese Dialects / Languages
Tracing and disentangling these many threads and the myriad of Chinese languages is a fascinating topic. It does however lie beyond the scope of this article.
The standard branch
For most foreigners, learning Chinese will equal learning Mandarin, although, of course, many also choose to learn other dialects. For the sake of simplicity and brevity, however, I will, as far as I can, limit myself to mainly discussing Mandarin from now on.
In order to understand the recent history, and future, of Mandarin, we need to first look at its historical and modern settings.
China — From Small Settlement to Nation-State
So, we have seen that change is inevitable and that the Sinosphere and the Chinese languages have been changing continuously over the last three millennia. And it hasn’t stopped. Just like all other countries or languages, the modern states of The People’s Republic of China or 中華人民共和國, and The Republic of China 中華民國, or Taiwan, have not been frozen in time.
Animated Map of Chinese Dynasties
Instead, this part of the world has evolved over the past 4 millennia, going from a regionally small settlement with maybe a couple of million people to the modern Chinese state covering around 9.5 million km2 and with a population of around 1.4 billion.
The Standard Tongue
Lingua francas have existed in what is today modern China since at least the 8th century BCE. The variety of that era is called 古文 (gǔwén) which means “ancient text” or 文言 wényán, meaning “text language” and is usually translated as “Classical Chinese”. This was not a spoken standard but a written one, which allowed for unification in writing even amidst several mutually unintelligible spoken varieties. Confucius, born in the mid-sixth century BCE reportedly spoke 雅言 (yǎyán) “elegant speech”, the prestige standard spoken by the elite of that time.
It was in the Ming Dynasty, founded in the 13 hundreds when the name 官話 (guānhuà) “bureaucrat speech” began to be used. This was later translated by the Portugues into Mandarim, that is, Mandarin.
The term 普通話 (Pǔtōnghuà), or Modern Standard Mandarin, was officially coined by the People’s Republic of China in 1955, after the Civil War, and marks a name change from the earlier 國語 (guóyǔ), a name that is still used in Taiwan to refer to the standard dialect of Taiwanese Chinese.
普通話 (Pǔtōnghuà) is based on the variety spoken in Bejing, and 國語 (guóyǔ) on the variety spoken in Taipei.
The History of Chinese as a Foreign Language
Foreigners, that is non-Chinese, or speakers of other languages than Chinese, have been living in China for millennia. Some even conquered China, became emperors and established dynasties, ruling China for centuries. It stands to reason that some, but certainly not all of them, learned to speak Chinese. These were mostly if not exclusively foreigners that lived in areas with contiguous land borders to China, like the Mongols and the Manchus.
As for more distant foreigners, Africans have long had contact with the Chinese, with trade routes established between the East African City-States and China in the 9 hundreds, allowing Africans to travel to China to trade, and study. Probably at least some of them learned the local language.
Even the continent farthest from East Asia, South America, has been in contact with China since at least the 16 hundreds, when connections were established across the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and China, going via the Philippines.
Chinese Admiral Zheng He exploring the east coast of Africa
Manila Galleon Reception in Ladrones Islands
As for Europe, the Roman Empire established contact with China already in the second century CE, with Roman diplomats reaching China in the second and third century. More recently, a number of Europeans have been living in China since at least the 13th century, engaging in trade and missionary work during the era of Pax Mongolica, from the beginning of the 12 hundreds to the mid 13 hundreds. One of these European travelers was Marco Polo, who was the quintessential travel blogger of his time. But as far as we know, he never learned to speak Chinese.
The historical interest among international foreigners who lived far away from China to learn the Chinese language has been low. This is not surprising given that most of the world’s 7000 languages never gain this kind of attention at all, with a few notable exceptions like Arabic, English, and Spanish. And very recently, Chinese.
China — from the 1970s till Today
Just the last four decades have seen enormous changes in Chinese society. China’s wealth has grown from $7 trillion in 2000 to $120 trillion in 2020. 800 million people have been brought out of poverty according to the word bank, although some are skeptical.
An illustration of this is urbanization. According to the administrative divisions of China, there are now 687 cities in China (not including Taiwan), out of which 409 have a population of over 100 000 people. And while in 1980 only 19% of the population lived in cities. By 2021 this was up to 63%.
This rapid urbanization could happen because China is building cities at a record speed, with 600 new cities having been built since the 1950s. In fact, nearly all of modern urban China was built during the last 30 years, with Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou being exceptions to the rule.
One contributing factor to this massive urbanization is the fact that there are simply many more Chinese citizens around today than before the 1911 revolution that overthrew the last emperor. The Chinese population has exploded over the last century from around 450 million in 1900 to around 1.4 billion today. Almost a tripling. Or even more strikingly, from around 540 million in 1949 to just shy of a billion in 1980.
Chinese Population Growth Graph
Even though the Chinese economy has grown impressively over the last century, it did not really take off until the 1990s. And, among growing fears of overpopulation, then Supreme Leader 邓小平 (Dèng Xiǎopíng) implemented a strictly enforced birth-control policy in 1982. The one-child policy.
I’ll discuss some of the consequences of these massive undertakings in a little while.
Reborn Interest from Foreigners to Learn Mandarin
China's recent increase in power, if not prestige, on the world scene has prompted many foreigners to choose to study Mandarin. Good numbers are hard to come by, but one metric is that 750 000 people took the HSK Chinese proficiency test in 2010, compared to roughly 116 000 in 2005. During the same period, the number of foreign students in China went up from 36 000 to 240 000. And according to the Chinese ministry of education, there are currently 25 million foreigners learning Chinese. The exact number of students is irrelevant, the point is that Chinese as a foreign language has been trending upwards for the last 20 odd years.
This can be compared to the number of Chinese students to the USA, which peaked at 372 000 before the pandemic, and is currently reported to be 317 000. As for English in China, the numbers vary widely between 10 million and 300 million, with the former group sometimes said to be speakers and the latter said to be learners.
Again the exact numbers are somewhat irrelevant when we consider that whichever way we look at it tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people fall somewhere on the Chinese-English bilingual spectrum. This is important since this is how language pairs influence each other — in the minds of people who speak both.
So we have seen that the interest from Foreigners to learn Chinese has grown over the last two decades, and likewise the interest from Chinese to learn English is high. What is the future of this mutual interest and linguistic exchange?
To answer that, let’s first have a look at the Chinese State over the past decade.
Consolidation of Power & Wolf Diplomacy
Xi Jinping took control of the communist party and of China when he became General Secretary of the CCP in 2012 and then President of China in 2013. After ascending to power, he quickly launched a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign that ended up affecting over a million officials and removing thousands, both high and low, including many of Xi’s political rivals. With any real rivals out of the way, Xi didn’t spare any time in consolidating power to himself.
Secretary of the CCP, Xi Jinping
Following this, Xi swiftly started developing a more assertive or even belligerent Chinese international stance. During this time China left its former foreign policy motto 韜光養晦 (tāoguāng-yǎnghuì) — To conceal one’s light and bide one’s time — to the more aggressive 戰狼外交 (Zhànláng Wàijiāo) — Wolf Warrior style diplomacy.
This new style has been characterized for example by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman 赵立坚 (Zhào Lìjiān)’s provocation against Australia on Twitter, and former Chinese ambassador to Sweden 桂从友 (Guì Cóngyǒu)’s many threats against journalists.
Gui Congyou, former Chinese ambassador to Sweden
New Superpower or New Soviet?
For the past several decades, China has been the economic wonder of the world. I already mentioned some of the remarkable accomplishments pulled off by china during this period. The world looked with amazement at the speed with which China built a vast high-speed train network, houses and entire new cities.
China was clearly getting richer, and at a breakneck speed at that. At the same time, the childbirth policies seemed to have worked and the Chinese population started to plateau at the still massive 1.4 billion people. A plateauing population in combination with a booming economy meant that the Chinese people was getting richer and, just like the Japanese before them, wealthy Chinese tourists were soon everywhere dressed in expensive clothes and carrying the most modern cameras.
But there were cracks starting to appear.
The Price of World Wonders and Child Policies
The aforementioned influx of people to urban areas means that the cities, as well as the countryside, are changing rapidly. As skilled workers migrate to the higher salaries in the cities hundreds of villages are left empty, or at least bereft of their most productive young workforce.
Building new cities from scratch on a massive scale is often extremely profitable at the onset, but may as time goes by become increasingly problematic.
In China, real Estate constitutes 29% of GDP, however 20% of buildings stand empty. This translates to around 65 million vacant properties and has resulted in a situation where entire sections of these Ghost Cities remain entirely unpopulated.
As far as I understand it, real estate has been key in increasing China’s wealth, and the Chinese people have been incentivized to invest in it. The real estate market has been steadily growing, prompting people who already own homes to buy property anyway, and so the bubble kept growing. How will this seemingly impending housing bubble develop? Only the future can tell.
天都城 (Tiāndūchéng) west of Shanghai, stands empty
As for the one-child policy — when Supreme Leader 邓小平 (Dèng Xiǎopíng) implemented it in 1982 it was born out of a legitimate concern for overpopulation. However, the measures might have been unnecessary. Whatever would have happened or could have happened we don’t know.
What we do know is that China, alongside many other countries in the West, is facing huge demographic challenges due to a rapidly aging population. In other words, China’s population pyramid is becoming increasingly top-heavy. 40 million are expected to retire over the upcoming 3 years, while the working-age population will shrink by 35 million during the same period. This may have dire consequences for the future of the Chinese economy.
Chinese population 1950 to 2022
The future of Chinese as a Second Language
We have previously seen that tens of millions of non-Chinese are currently learning Mandarin, and that likewise tens of millions of Chinese are learning English. I’m being conservative, the true numbers, depending on how we count, might be in the hundreds of millions, in both cases.
So how will the current state of affairs affect Chinese as a language that the rest of the world will want to learn? As I see it, there are three main factors influencing you to learn a new language. These are:
- Because it’s cool
- It’s good for business
- It’s for my family
Is China cool? I’m old enough (barely) to remember when Japan became cool. Around the year 2000 Tamagotchis and Pokémons were suddenly everywhere, and almost overnight all my older friends were learning Japanese. The question is: is China cool today, like Japan was and still is cool? And if it is, how will this perceived coolness be affected by the above-mentioned change of international rhetoric to a more belligerent and rude tone, not to mention the recently growing international attention to the unrest and crackdowns in areas like 新疆 Xīnjiāng, 香港 Hong Kong, and the growing threats of military violence in 台灣 Táiwān? I don’t know. But I imagine this PR cannot be good.
Likewise, will the demographic and real estate crises facing China affect the way foreign investors look upon the country? If business opportunities on the Chinese mainland are perceived to diminish, fewer foreigners could be incentivized to study Mandarin. But it’s too early to tell.
As for family reasons, if you come from a Chinese-speaking family background, that is not dependent on whatever happens politically, socially, economically, demographically, or culturally in China or anywhere else. If your loved ones speak Mandarin, chances are you will be more likely to do so too. And that is not going to change.
Opportunity for Language and Cultural Exchange
Additionally, what we are looking for, apart from foreigners’ interest to learn Mandarin, are the opportunities that exist for language and cultural exchange.
Because no matter how cool China is, and no matter how attractive its markets are to foreign investors, these factors don’t matter much if the opportunities to get into China for educational or business reasons dwindle or grind to a halt.
I’m writing this in May of 2022, and just during the last 6 months, this is exactly what we have seen happening. This is largely, but not only, because of Xi Jinping’s zero covid policy. While the rest of the world has, at least grudgingly, accepted a world in which we all have to learn to live with covid-19, China has not.
As of April 2022, only a handful of foreign students are allowed to enter China, and international students who were previously studying in China are finding it difficult or impossible to return.
Daily life in Shanghai under zero-covid lockdown
Further, as of May 2022, up to 400 million Chinese citizens are under strict government-enforced lockdowns in 45 cities across China. These lockdowns have wreaked havoc on the daily lives of people in Shanghai, and of Hong Kong which has recently been forcibly incorporated into the Chinese mainland. In a recent survey targeted at expatriates, 850 out of 1000 respondents said that they were considering leaving China due to their experience of the lockdown. Of course, saying is one thing, doing is another, and 1000 people are not statistically significant. Only time can tell how this story will actually unfold. Perhaps more damningly, Jörg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said that 50% of European immigrants to China had left since the start of the pandemic, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if the other half left. But again, so far this is speculation.
As for the economy, Reuters reports an outflow of foreign investment out of China, but the CCP via the Global Times would beg to differ.
The Future of the Sinosphere
As for what this will mean for the future of the Sinosphere, there are as many guesses as there are experts (or youtube channels) so I’m not going to commit to any one of them.
What if China launches an invasion of Taiwan amidst its aforementioned deteriorating relations with the West? There has been a renewed support for Taiwan from some major Western countries lately, including the USA, which has the by far strongest navy in existence. What will the consequences of all of this be? Here are two alternatives.
Over the last two months, some voices have been expressing hope that China will watch the protracted war in Ukraine in combination with a surprisingly unified Western response and learn the lesson that invading Taiwan is probably a bad idea in the near future.
There is however no way we can know what the CCP is really thinking, and it might be learning the very opposite lesson, namely that creating an external common enemy is an effective way to galvanize its population and create social unity during a time of great economic and pandemic hardship.
Only the future can tell, but what we can already see is that international relations between China and the West are getting frostier. What does this mean for the future of Mandarin Chinese and its role internationally?
The Future of Mandarin Chinese
Whether we are focusing on the future of the status of Chinese as an attractive foreign language, or on the development of the Chinese language itself as it comes into contact with other languages, I think we shouldn’t be too quick to draw conclusions based on the current political situation. Compared to politicians who need to respond quickly to a rapidly changing world, languages prefer to take their time.
If your interest in the Chinese languages is purely economical in nature and waxes and wanes in concordance with the volume of foreign investment into China, then you might not be reading this. But even if you are you will know that there will still be ample opportunities within the Sinosphere during the foreseeable future.
Cantonese and English speaking family
And of course, if your interest in mandarin has anything to do with friends, romantic partners, family, culture and history, and unless China launches a war against Taiwan, you have nothing to worry about. Your loved ones will be there for you, and Chinese culture and traditions will be as rich as always.
For now.
