The soft power of 'Happy Chinese'

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/18/opinion/edvatik.php

The soft power of 'Happy Chinese'
Michael Vatikiotis
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2006

CHIANG MAI, Thailand Twenty years ago if you wanted to learn Chinese in Thailand, there were very few legal options available. Access to education in the mother tongue was restricted even for Thailand's sizable Chinese community because of a fear of Communist influence.

A Thai-Chinese friend of mine remembers learning Chinese in secret under the dining room table. You could, if you liked, attend a sizable Chinese language school run by the 93rd regiment of the Kuomintang who retreated from China after 1949 and settled in the remote hills of Northern Thailand. At one time in the 1980s, the Mae Salong Chinese school was the only educational institution legally offering a secondary school Chinese curriculum in the entire country.

The end of the Cold War and China's rise has changed all this. Today you can wander along the crowded streets of Chiang Mai or Bangkok and find Chinese language schools as easily as internet cafes - tiny classrooms tucked away in a row of shop houses.

"Chiang Mai Language School" just off Chiang Mai's Changklarn Road is typical. There I met a teacher, Jiang Jiew Moe, who hails from Taiwan. "The school just gets bigger every year," he said. Last year there were 100 students. This year 150 have enrolled. Last year 19 of Jiang's students passed the standard proficiency set by an examination board in China. "My students are mostly young, in their 20's. They come because parents think of their future and want them to learn the language."

Thailand is taking the Chinese language seriously, so seriously that the government has asked China to send teachers. In the second week of January, China's deputy education minister, Zhang Xin-sheng, was in Bangkok to sign an agreement to help train 1,000 Mandarin language teachers every year for Thailand. China will also offer 100 scholarships for Thai students to study in China, and send 500 young volunteers to teach Chinese in Thailand.

Meanwhile, the Thai Education Ministry aims to promote the Chinese language alongside compulsory English and hopes that one third of high school students will be proficient in Chinese within five years.

Lending impetus to this move are China's other efforts to promote Chinese language education overseas. Beijing recently established the Confucius Institute, modelled on the British Council and German Goethe Institute, as a nonprofit outfit with the stated mission of "promoting Chinese language and culture and supporting local Chinese teaching." Eleven of the centers have been established in the United States, Europe and Asia. China's national office for teaching Chinese as a foreign language, which runs the Confucius Institutes, will provide textbooks for schools in Southeast Asia with the catchy title "Happy Chinese."

All of this is a sign of expanding Chinese soft power. But what are the implications of the spread of Chinese language and culture? It's a more important question in a region like Southeast Asia where as many as half the people living in urban areas like Bangkok are of Chinese descent. Many of the young students who attend Jiang's class in the Chiang Mai school have Chinese roots - their fathers and grandfathers came from China. Learning Chinese has deeper implications than the earlier fad in the 1980s of learning Japanese. For one thing, it's hard to become a Japanese citizen.

I asked my friends in Chiang Mai, Angsana and Anirut Thongchai, both of whom are of Chinese descent, whether they were pushing their children to learn Chinese. Their elder daughter Prang is into Japanese comics in a big way. Neither she nor her brother has learned Chinese. "It would be a good idea, but we're not pushing them," said Angsana, a teacher at Chiang Mai University.

There's certainly a reason in business circles to learn Chinese; Thailand has already signed a bilateral free-trade agreement with China and is negotiating one with the United States. Over a million Japanese visited Thailand last year, but this year a million Chinese tourists are expected to visit Thailand, according to the Ministry of Tourism.

Jiang cites another and perhaps less obvious incentive for learning Chinese. "It is well known that there are more men than women in Chinese society. We can expect a lot of Chinese men to come looking for brides in Thailand," he predicts in a matter of fact way. "Already the majority of my students are women. They are preparing themselves for Chinese suitors."