The China syndrome

It’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.

Labour promised to rectify this when they were in power and the present education secretary, Michael Gove, promised a further 1,000 Mandarin teachers as part of a five-year programme.

Progress has been minimal with 150 new teachers of Mandarin up to GCSE standard said to be in the pipeline. The Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute in London is undertaking the training and some teacher training courses are also being run by the institute’s base in Sheffield.

One enterprising school which has found its own answer to the teacher shortage is Woldgate College at Pocklington in East Yorkshire. They have arranged Mandarin Chinese lessons with a qualified tutor via a video link for six formers, although it’s not for exam purposes.

Neil Martin, the college’s e-learning co-ordinator said, “We have six or seven Year 12 pupils who do two one-hour lessons a week as an enrichment option. We intend to do the same next year. We are not thinking of Mandarin Chinese as part of the mainstream curriculum.”

Maybe national foot-dragging is not surprising at a time when even familiar languages like French and German have fallen out of favour. We often find mastering those to be pretty tough. Set against the great wall of understanding that divides us from the Chinese, learning a European language seems like a doddle.

And this is why an opportunity to mix socially with native speakers once a week, which joining the Leeds school would allow you to do, seems an ideal means of finding the first cultural foothold on a formidable language barrier.

Its chairman, Dr Wuhu Feng, who also works at Leeds University said, “We encourage and support pupils to understand various other aspects of Chinese culture and also aim to develop their emotional stability and to stimulate their talents, self-esteem and confidence.” It’s surprising that more ambitious parents are not knocking at the door already.

But be warned: the way ahead is long and challenging. Chinese has about 40,000 characters and each of those may require 30 strokes in their making. A syllable can have different meanings. It all depends on the intonation when you pronounce it.

Even Pinyin – the system of spelling out Chinese characters in our alphabet to simplify matters for westerners – looks a hard nut to crack on its own.

After the first session of the afternoon at the Chinese school, I canvass the views of some of the pupils about their lessons as they spill out into the lobby. There’s a general complaint of “it’s too hard” – and this is from children who probably hear Chinese spoken regularly at home. Maybe they are just not that keen on being in school on Saturday afternoons.

Some parents are listening to their children’s responses and the Tiger Mothers among them are irritated by any defeatist talk. “She is here not to play, she’s here to work,” says one about her reluctant daughter. “I have to push her.”

Another says, “Speaking is not a problem, but writing is and it’s difficult to maintain the momentum of learning just within the home. The qualified tutors here give it structure. It’s not mission impossible – 1,000 words and you can communicate.”

Wei Ji, who brings her two daughters here each Saturday, says: “We don’t want our children to lose this capacity. We put them on a road when they are young when it’s like a hobby and then they can build up. It’s much easier to learn when you are younger.”

Is there any Chinese language element in the curriculum at the normal schools their children attend? The parents put their heads together and come up with a sketchy picture from personal experience. Woodhouse Grove High School in Leeds is doing Chinese once a week, noon till two as a second language, they say. Harrogate Grammar and Leeds Grammar it seems are doing something similar.

One mum volunteers the news that at Drighlington Primary School near Leeds they have been learning two traditional Chinese songs, called Two Tigers and Looking for Friends.

Bewilderingly, China has eight major dialects and a fifth of the world, 1.3 billion people, speak some form of Chinese. Mandarin is the only spoken dialect which also has a written form. It’s the language of officialdom and it has been the glue that bound together over a vast area one culture and its values. Latin once played a similar role in Europe.

What the Chinese actually speak in the country’s 23 provinces, as opposed to what they write, is different again. The Chinese categorise them separately: “wen” refers to the written language and “yu” the spoken language.

You can see why exporters who don’t grasp this would be scratching their heads. Currently some 44 per cent of the UK’s foreign trade is with the EU and less than three per cent is with China. It adds up to £8.8 billion worth of goods, although 20 per cent of that is in the form of scrap metal.

The Year of the Dragon (the most propitious of the twelve creatures of the Chinese Zodiac) will be succeeded by the Year of the Snake on this upcoming Chinese New Year. They prefer to call it the Spring Festival and welcome it in with family reunions, banquets and firecrackers.

The Snake is regarded as clever and calculating and driven by goals – which would not be a bad set of credentials for any UK entrepreneur looking to conquer a market in China.

One of the few western faces at the Leeds Community Mandarin Chinese School when I visited belonged to Stephen Middleton who runs a vintage rail carriage restoration and hire business in Harrogate.

Stephen’s wife was born in Beijing. Their daughter Honey, now aged seven, was born in Harrogate but went to live in China shortly after. Honey’s parents are now planning a future for their daughter as a Chinese translator.

“She was in China for a year so that when she returned to Yorkshire her first language was Chinese and she spoke no English,” says Stephen. “Even so she needs to study the written work. We do 10-20 minutes of Chinese every day and we come here every Saturday. We want her to be able to capitalise on those assets.”

For more information about the Chinese school, contact Dr Wuhu Feng, 0113 343 7934, email: [email protected]