The claim
Australians wrongly believe they have an innate understanding of China simply because it is Australia’s biggest trading partner, according to Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen.
At the recent launch of Labor’s plan to deepen ties with Asia, Bowen said it was to Australia’s disadvantage that the number of Year 12 students studying Chinese had dropped significantly since 2005.
“Out of the 25 million Australians who populate this great country … 130 people can speak Mandarin at a level good enough to do business, who aren’t of Chinese background,” he said. “We have a long, long way to go.”
Is that correct? Are there only 130 Australians of non-Chinese heritage who can speak Mandarin proficiently?
RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
The verdict
Bowen’s claim is an educated guess.
It was first promulgated by two Australian academics.
Professor Daniel Kane, formerly the head of Chinese studies at Macquarie University, estimated the number with the help of other academics, including Dr Jane Orton, director of Chinese teacher training at the University of Melbourne.
Kane and Orton told Fact Check there was no formal or precise way of calculating how many people of non-Chinese background used Mandarin at a proficient level.
But given this group was so small, it was possible to count them informally, they said.
Fact Check canvassed the figure of 130 with several experts in the field, all of whom agreed that it was likely to be in the ballpark.
How do we define proficiency in Mandarin?
Orton defined Chinese language proficiency as a standard that was normal for adults to use for work purposes.
She said this meant people who could read, write, speak and understand the language as well as a native Chinese person, in order to do tasks such as give a lecture in their field, read documents, take notes, run a meeting, or run an office or factory.
This standard broadly equates to level five or six in the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) test — an international standardised test used to assess the Chinese language proficiency of non-native speakers.
Level five denotes those who can read Chinese newspapers and magazines, watch Chinese films and write and deliver a long speech in Chinese.
Level six denotes people who can easily understand any information communicated in Chinese and can easily express themselves in writing or speech.
How was the number of 130 derived?
The figure of 130 was an estimate calculated by a group led by Professor Kane, comprising Year 12 Chinese language examiners, university lecturers, members of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and members of the Australia China Business Council.
The group counted the number of people with proficient Chinese language skills working in the following areas and organisations: academia, the public service, the diplomatic community, the Australia-China Business Council and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as well as non-Chinese teachers of Chinese.
Professor Kane told Fact Check he had not included the military and noted that his methodology was “guesswork, but educated guesswork.”
“There really is no accurate way of calculating how many [non-native Chinese] people speak Chinese at a proficient level in Australia,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it was greatly in excess of that.”
Dr Orton said the group had originally estimated 105 people, about five years ago, but added a further 25 to account for anyone who may have been missed.
“The China world [in Australia] is still small and basically everyone knows everyone … plus, if you have learned Chinese to any standard, you will have gone through one of the Australian schools and universities,” she said. “One hundred and thirty is an informal, but very well informed, estimate. Even if it was 105, or 120, or 145, it couldn’t matter less; it’s still absolutely peanuts.”
What do other China specialists think?
Clinton Dines, a former president of BHP Billiton China, and a fluent Mandarin speaker who lived in China for almost 36 years before returning to Australia in 2014, said 130 was likely a generous estimate.
He said while there were probably more than 130 Australians of non-Chinese background who could speak good conversational Chinese, there were probably fewer than 130 who could read, write and speak Chinese with the proficiency necessary for the highest professional levels.
“In terms of senior decision-making roles — government, academia, business — there’s not 130, I can tell you that for sure,” he said.
The president of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association of Victoria and chief Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE) examiner in Chinese as a second language, Jixing Xu, told Fact Check it was impossible to know the exact number because “no one is keeping these numbers”.
Hamish Curry, the executive director of the Asia Education Foundation, said: “Chris Bowen is correct to point out the low number of adults in Australia of a non-Chinese background or heritage who have a business level of proficiency in Mandarin.
“One of the key pipelines to change this would be to have more students learning Chinese in schools. Yet the percentage of students completing Year 12 Mandarin has barely shifted in the last 10 years.”
So, what do the numbers show about students learning Chinese?
Data collated by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) shows Year 12 enrolments in Chinese as a percentage of all language enrolments has remained within a narrow band between 19% to 21% since 2006.
According to the statistics, Victoria has the most students studying Chinese at secondary school.
In Victoria, Chinese is offered at three levels in the VCE: Chinese as a first language, Chinese as a second language and Chinese as a second language advanced.
ACARA details three separate streams of students:
- First language learners who are generally international students (L1)
- Background learners (or home speaker learners) who are local students who have spoken Chinese since birth (BL)
- Second language learners who learn Chinese only at school (L2).
Figures compiled by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) show the number of Victorian students enrolled to study Chinese as a first language increased by 27% in the five years to 2018.
Meanwhile, students enrolled to study Chinese as a second language slumped by 23% over the same period.
Why are fewer local students studying Chinese?
According to a 2016 report prepared by Dr Orton for the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, the number of students learning Chinese in Australian schools has doubled since 2008, to 172,832.
The expansion has occurred nationally, although not uniformly; half of all students of Chinese live in Victoria.
The report identified weaknesses in teaching and a lack of funding for special programs among the main reasons for why the number of students studying Chinese as a second language has dropped.
It also identified a rise in international students taking Chinese, but only a small rise in the total number of local students of any kind taking the subject.
It said there had been “an overall drop over the past eight years of some 20% in the number of [students] taking Chinese as a second language.”
The report noted that students who spoke Chinese at home usually enrolled in Chinese as a second language “in order to get high marks”.
“Senior classes in some long-running L2 Chinese programs have been decimated; this is largely due to the presence of crushing numbers of home speaker learners being assessed as L2, who fill the high score quotas.”
The report added: “There is also evidence that more than a half of those who begin Chinese in primary [school] do not continue in secondary [school] if they have a choice to opt out.”
Why is Mandarin proficiency important for Australia?
Orton said Australians being able to communicate efficiently in Chinese was necessary, not just for business purposes, but for Australia’s overall prosperity and security.
Dines said language proficiency was vital for building trust, especially with people in societies, such as China, where personal trust was more important than “institutional trust.”
“[Australians] have rule of law, whereas in the developing world and places like China, there is very little institutional trust,” he said.
“Trust is intensely personal. So you go nowhere at a political, diplomatic or business level without the capacity to develop trust.”
The Gillard government’s 2012 white paper Australia in the Asian Century intended to plan for the nation’s future within Asia, stating: “The capacity for Australians to build deeper ties with Asia will be hampered if there is not an increase in proficiency of languages other than English.”
“Relying on the language capabilities of Asian-Australians for all of Australia’s relationships and engagement will not be adequate. Proficiency in more than one language is a basic skill of the 21st century.”
Principal researcher: Sushi Das, chief of staff
Sources
- Twitter video of Chris Bowen, May 3, 2019
- Asia: a priority for a Labor government, SBS, May 3, 2019
- Chris Bowen speech transcript, Global Foundation in February, 2019
- Chris Bowen speech, A Case for Engagement with Asia, September 29, 2017
- Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority, performance senior secondary
- Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, National Report on Schooling in Australia, 2017
- Languages in Victorian Government Schools report, 2010
- Australian Government, Australia in the Asian Century, 2012
The article kind of touches on a significant issue – the scoring system used for university entrance in Australia breaks down with “2nd language” subjects. These subjects give a huge advantage to people who are native speakers/home speakers of the language; because of standardised scoring, they also give a huge disadvantage to local non-speakers who take them on.
Had I studied Mandarin at high school, even decades ago, most of my class would have been Chinese-Australian including first-generation immigrants, and I would have been near the bottom of the class no matter how hard I worked.
It is a huge disincentive to study a subject like Mandarin. I haven’t had cause to look at the numbers in recent years but I know that languages like Spanish (still useful globally, but not full of native speakers in Australian high schools) were becoming much more popular at year 11 and 12 level despite all the effort by schools to teach classes in Mandarin and Japanese at lower grade levels.
It is true that students who have spoken Chinese since birth (whether born in Australia or China) have a proficiency level that most classroom learners cannot compete with, but that is true in all the languages taught in schools, and there are such candidates in all of them at Year 12. The factor that makes the difference in Chinese is the number of them – in Victoria they outnumber the classroom learners at a ratio of about 6:1. Having 700 candidates ahead of them is what depresses the classroom learners’ scores. And that is possible because the criterion for allocation to stream of Year 12 is based on residency not proficiency. (Residency is the wrong criterion because country of residency is irrelevant when acquiring a first language – babies don’t get out much, it’s the language of the home surrounds that makes the difference.)
Australian largest private labour hire agency, AWX, actively recruits overseas workers in Mandarin.
Jobs for exploited foreign workers hired by foreign job search providers that Howard gave open slather to after killing off the CES
Does Bowen have any credibilty left on any political or other issues for that matter , the main reason for Scomos election win should just shut up and ask Scomo for a foreign posting for services rendered to the trickle down cause.
The funny thing is, I know an anglo person with a Chinese Language degree. In her fourth year, she was the only non-Mandarin speaking person in her class. The rest of the group was made up of Chinese people getting easy credit points for their compulsory elective (oxymoron alert) subjects.
She might not be exactly fluent but she can get by and knows when rude Chinese men remark on the size of her nose, wax lyrical about her being a prostitute or call her a foreign devil. And she let’s them know.
The idea that Australia is an impoverished country. because so few people speak Chinese is another aspect of the “Cargo Cult” mentality of the Australian liberal class. In spite of the fact that Australia has sold shitloads of stuff to the Chinese and bought shit loads of stuff off them without every second Australian speaking Chinese is testament to the fact that it doesn’t matter. We speak English fairly well, but don’t export that much to the English speaking, UK or US (when compared with China).
There are about twenty or so languages spoken by significant numbers of people in the World and guess what; those countries with the most people have the most number of people who speak their particular language.
Language teachers love to tell us that learning another language makes us smarter. The evidence for this is not compelling, but the evidence for the contrary view is even slimmer. Self interest is the overwhelming factor in this specious argument.
I know English, C, Matlab, Python, Visual Basic for Applications, ARM Assembler, 6800 Assembler, Bailey Batch Language, SQL, others that I can’t recall at the moment. All of these languages have been of far more use to me in my work than Mandarin or Swahili.
The Chinese couldn’t care less whether we can speak Chinese or not. All they care about is getting their hands on cheap resources and selling their surplus manufactured goods to us. There’s always some supercilious nerd like Rudd to do the necessary translations.
The idea that we learnthe Chinese language is so we can show how much we respect, love them and are subservient to them. This is so they will give us preferential treatment in trade. What utter garbage.
Why should we be subservient to a nasty totalitarian dictatorship whose leader has self appointed himself for life and who murder their own kids when they rebel against them.
On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, people like Bowen should have a little rethink about their admiration for the Chinese and whether speaking their language is so critical to Austrlia’s place in the world.
And don’t for a moment think this means I like the US, UK or for heavens sake the French. They aren’t any better and in some cases much worse.
If people want to learn Chinese or for that matter any other language, good on them, but don’t try and claim that is’s essential to Australia being a respected “adult” and independent country in the world. The governments handling of the rights to free speech, the freedom of journalists and other such mundane aspects of Australasian society will have somewhat more sway in the worlds view of us.
Just a couple of points:
1. I advocate more Australians being able to speak high proficiency Chinese but certainly not ‘every second Australian’. Kevin Rudd proposed 12% competent in one of the four Asian languages taught in Australian schools. That would be about 25,000 students out of the approximately 172,000 in their age cohort. The proportion of those one might suggest be able to speak Chinese would not be more than 8,000.
2. The reason we would seek to have that resource in our community would be to enable us to create relationships and to access information not otherwise available to us independently, and to use these relationships and information to support our continuing prosperity and security.