Melashu decided to learn Mandarin after a plank landed on his head. At the time, he was working as a mechanic for a Chinese construction firm in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. His expatriate manager asked him to fetch a wrench. Puzzled, Melashu returned from the garage with a piece of wood. Impatient, his supervisor snatched the plank from him and hit him on the head.
‘It hurt like hell! But I couldn’t hit him back. If I’d done so, I’d have to travel back to Mekelle.’ The possible consequences of upsetting his boss shot through his mind. Melashu had just started working for the company. He could not afford to lose his job. Nor did he have the money to return to his home in Mekelle. ‘At that point, I decided to learn Chinese.’
Melashu first joined a Chinese enterprise when he was still a teenager in the early 2000s. The company was one of the two Chinese state-owned firms involved in the construction of the Tekeze Dam, close to his hometown, Abi Adi, in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. A female relative, employed as a cleaner, recommended him to her expatriate managers. Melashu quit school when the company offered him a job.
His Chinese managers taught him pipe shaping and bending technologies. They were patient with him, Melashu fondly remembers. After Tekeze was completed, he traversed the country. Equipped with a rare skill set, he worked for different Chinese companies on hydropower projects and, later, as a mechanic on road and railway construction sites. Working for the Chinese afforded him tremendous mobility. Soon, he had seen more of Ethiopia than had any of his relatives.
Melashu began picking up Chinese words following that fateful blow to his head in Dire Dawa. He jotted their pronunciation down in Fidel, the script used in his native Tigrinya and Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic, and memorised them. After obtaining a comfortable command of Mandarin, he started applying for interpreter jobs with Chinese companies. Nowadays, he is fluent in spoken Mandarin.
External and Internal Frontiers
Melashu belongs to a growing group of Mandarin speakers in Africa and beyond. In Ethiopia, there are two types of local interpreters of Mandarin Chinese. The first learned the language the hard way, like Melashu. The second acquired Mandarin the soft way in the benches of one of the Confucius Institutes (CIs) or Confucius Classrooms established across Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa over the past two decades. While the former embodies the globalisation of Mandarin from below, the latter are the beneficiaries of the efforts of the Chinese Government to expand the frontier of Mandarin-language education.
This issue of Global China Pulse (GCP) explores the globalisation of Mandarin and its implications inside and outside China. Its contributors discuss language contact along China’s cultural, political, and economic frontiers overseas, as well as the politics of language at China’s internal frontiers. In exploring this domestic dimension, they highlight the fault lines between, on one side, cultural preservationists, government censors, and policymakers and, on the other, a public that tests the boundaries of permissible speech, continues to embrace English, and is slowly losing its skills to write what makes Mandarin unique: its characters.
Concerted efforts of language preservation and purification at home coincide with language innovation and experimentation at global China’s frontiers, which bring speakers of different languages together in sectors as diverse as trade, tourism, hospitality, diplomacy, engineering, logistics, religion, culture, and media. As this issue shows, the challenge of communication across radical differences has given birth to a plethora of linguistic practices, including translation and interpretation, ‘trans-languaging’ (the dynamic shifts and exchanges of linguistic elements between ever-evolving languages in a multilingual world), and the emergence of pidgin languages.
Languages are typically thought to spread rather than intrude, permeate, or scatter. Evoking a world of smooth surfaces, the metaphor of spreading is, however, misleading. Marco Jacquemet (2005) proposes thinking of the movement of languages as flows that can penetrate and gulf, producing and reflecting asymmetric power relations. Whether driven by the state or set in motion by users on the ground, flows of Mandarin also move over uneven and, at times, rocky global terrain fraught with geopolitical tensions. En route, they submit to and challenge the existing linguistic hierarchies and hegemonies in inventive ways.
Mandarin Hegemony
The growing presence of Mandarin overseas cannot be understood without considering shifting linguistic hierarchies in China. In her essay, Gina Anne Tam uses the concept of ‘Mandarin hegemony’ to capture the structural forces embedded in state institutions, driven by policies promoting de facto monolingualism and reinforced by popular discourses that uphold Mandarin as the sole national language. Mandarin hegemony, Tam explains, instils an entitlement in native speakers who expect to hear Mandarin in public spaces, use it at the workplace, and read it online.
However, Mandarin hegemony does not go unchallenged, as testified by popular resistance to the Chinese Government’s growing intolerance of ethnic-minority languages in places such as Tibet (Roche 2024), Xinjiang (Tobin 2020), and Inner Mongolia (Baioud and Khuanuud 2022). As language is one of the main characteristics defining ethnicity in China, the fight to preserve one’s language has become a fight to maintain one’s identity. Still, as Dak Lhagyal elucidates in his contribution, even linguistic resistance is rife with tension. Mandarin holds the propitious, if precarious, promise of upward mobility. While some Tibetans seek to purify the Tibetan language by purging it of Chinese elements, others reluctantly encourage their children to become fluent in Mandarin. Mired by contradictions, popular language revitalisation efforts further fuel linguistic anxiety (Bulag 2003).
Hegemonic Extensions Overseas
Mandarin hegemony also manifests across China’s borders, where it is changing the linguistic makeup of the Chinese diaspora. Traditionally, most Chinese migrants who settled overseas came from the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Hainan, speaking Cantonese (粤), Hokkien (闽南), or Hakka (客家) (Li 2016). Most new arrivals are Mandarin speakers or use Mandarin as a lingua franca when interacting with fellow Chinese from other regions (Li and Zhu 2010). Regional languages are making way for Mandarin, especially in the old Chinatowns across Australia, Europe, and North America (Wong and Ang 2017). Occasionally, Mandarin’s hegemonic extensions generate friction.
In northern Thailand, the arrival of Mandarin-speaking immigrants and the influx of tourists from mainland China have caused tensions with long-established ethnic Chinese communities. The oldest generation of these communities arrived at the end of China’s Civil War in 1949. Many were Kuomintang soldiers and retained close ties to Taiwan. Tensions between established communities and new arrivals manifest in and through language, Po-Yi Hung shows in his essay. While new language schools, including CIs, teach simplified Chinese characters, existing schools run by members of established ethnic Chinese communities continue to teach the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The clash between simplified and traditional characters symbolises the ‘Two Chinas’ debate rekindled by China’s rise.
Formal Flows of Mandarin
China’s CIs have been central to the globalisation of Mandarin. While in Europe and North America, CIs complement existing programs in Chinese-language education (Hubbert 2019), in many parts of the world, such as Africa, they have opened a new frontier of Mandarin acquisition (King 2013). The Chinese Government’s role as both a sponsor and a censor of CIs has attracted scepticism, especially in the West. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (2014) controversially framed CIs as ‘academic malware’, depicting them as instruments that strengthen China’s geopolitical influence through the infiltration of Western educational institutions. Other scholars challenged this assumption and the alleged Cold War mentality on which it is based, highlighting the similarities between the CIs and the German Goethe Institutes or the French Maison Française schools (Yuan et al. 2016). Commonalities notwithstanding, CIs continue to be perceived as fundamentally different, operating as they do in a terrain dominated by Western cultural hegemony (Liu 2019). Because of China’s growing global presence, this terrain is, however, shifting, especially in regions where traditional forms of influence are waning.
In Africa, the establishment of CIs can be read as a strategic approach by the Chinese Government to manufacture consent through forging real or perceived solidarity through linguistic and cultural exchange, Simbarashe Gukurume argues in his essay on the University of Zimbabwe’s CI. This strategy, however, leans on the promise of Mandarin as what he calls a ‘linguistic currency’—one that can be spent to access economic benefits and career opportunities and unlock a better future. Yet, given fierce competition over limited opportunities, many students fail to convert this currency and materialise their aspirations (see also Elusoji 2023; Repnikova 2022). Even if tenuous, the hope of upward mobility, however, continues to attract students to Mandarin-language programs offered by CIs in Africa and beyond.
While formal institutions are critical to facilitating the flow of standard Mandarin and its acquisition worldwide, the Chinese State does not have a monopoly on the globalisation of Mandarin. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who move overseas for long or short periods—from diplomats, traders, labourers, and professionals to tourists, volunteers, entrepreneurs, and students—equally contribute to the flow of Mandarin, but they do so primarily through informal practices.
Informal Flows of Mandarin
Among these informal linguistic exchanges are grassroots initiatives for learning Mandarin. Jie Wang introduces us to one such initiative in Cairo, Egypt. The members of the Chinese Conversation Club Triple C gather weekly to improve their spoken Mandarin skills. They joined the club, or nādi, as they call it, for reasons like those of Zimbabwean students who choose to study Mandarin: the promise of career opportunities, especially in Egypt’s booming tourist sector. Yet, learning Chinese and doing so together, Wang found, go beyond utilitarian purposes. The conversation club provides a space for community, conviviality, and camaraderie, much like the Egyptian nādi—old Arabic for a place where people sit together and talk. Language learning, especially in informal settings, unites speakers and learners.
This is true, too, for Mandarin-speaking Jehovah’s Witness congregations in Zambia, established to cater to the sizeable Chinese migrant community there, as Justin Lee Haruyama demonstrates in his essay. The Witnesses seek to forge positive relations with Chinese migrants, even though few have struck up friendships with them. Their inclusive and proselytising gospel stands in stark contrast to anti-Chinese sentiments expressed in Christian churches near Chinese-managed work sites. In the congregations, translation strengthens spiritual bonds and generates solidarity, as it entails the conversion not just between languages but also between ontological worlds.
Haruyama’s case equally shows that Mandarin flows in and through distinct linguistic registers. The Mandarin the Witnesses used to translate complex liturgical texts and derive religious meaning from them was strongly influenced by written standard Mandarin. This formal register was distinct from the secular language education CIs offer and the Mandarin and pidgin spoken in the mines, on the farms, or at the construction sites in Zambia and beyond.
Language Contact
In everyday linguistic encounters, speakers or signers make accommodations to enable communication, if not necessarily in equal measure. Efforts to overcome the language barrier are often welcomed and reciprocated with empathy. In Nairobi’s Chinatown, as Amanda Kaminsky shows in her essay, Kenyan servers in Chinese establishments typically switch from standard English or Swahili to pidgin English when assisting Chinese customers. Some, like Grace, who worked behind the counter at a Chinese restaurant called Duck Express, peppered their communication with Mandarin words and phrases to resolve the tensions produced by the language barrier and break the ice. As Kamisky vividly illustrates and elucidates, the use of Mandarin or elements of the language, often in a jocular register, pierced the thin conviviality characteristic of Kenyan-Chinese encounters in Chinatown—a congeniality marked by a polite consensus upheld through minimal interactions and awkward silences. With a tinge of humour, linguistic accommodation thickened conviviality by producing proximity and, ultimately, solidarity. The Chinese customer who might have completed the transaction in silence and left feeling like an outsider was instead drawn into playful banter, eliciting laughter from all involved as insiders.
While translingual practices enliven fleeting encounters in the service sector, sustained interactions as a consequence of Chinese involvement in mining, construction, and trade across the world have given birth to new pidgin languages, which can be found, among others, in the nickel mines in Papua New Guinea (Aikhenvald 2024), in Zambia’s Chinese-managed copper and coalmines (Haruyama 2023), on Chinese building sites in Ethiopia (Driessen 2020), and in trading hubs at the Sino-Russian border (Fedorova 2018). In her contribution, Costanza Franceschini untangles the pidgin language known as ‘Chinese English’ used on Chinese construction sites in Ghana. One version of this pidgin resembles West African Pidgin English if sprinkled with Mandarin grammatical touches. The other draws its vocabulary from both English and Chinese. Like other pidgin languages, this vernacular comprises new words and transforms the meaning of existing words. Take walawala, for instance, meaning ‘talk’, or hallelujah, hallelujah—the praise to God chanted in worship—standing for ‘church’ or ‘religion’. Both versions of Chinese English, however, bear an imprint of Ghana’s colonial legacy and embody the lasting hegemony of English (Ke-Schutte 2023).
Despite the proliferation of Ghanaians with a good command of Mandarin and Chinese expatriates fluent in English, Chinese engineers and Ghanaian builders prefer to communicate without translation provided by a third party (Franceschini 2022). Communication gaps leave room for frivolous interpretation, legitimising the recipient’s choice for their preferred interpretation rather than the interpretation intended by the speaker with a cheeky eye to achieving a specific aim. Both parties know that they twist interpretations as they see fit, but they cannot take offence, leading to a sense of complicity. It comes as no surprise, then, that the transparency that interpreters create can be unwelcome. This is why Melashu, the Ethiopian interpreter introduced earlier, rarely interprets at the work site. He was only called on when misinterpretations turned awry, often when newcomers unfamiliar with the workplace vernacular were involved.
China’s Internal Frontiers
The globalisation of Mandarin has also stirred domestic debates about the status of Mandarin. At China’s internal frontiers, cultural preservationists, government censors, and ardent nationalists wage fiery battles with savvy citizens and sharp-witted netizens. Less visible, if no less palpable, internal frontiers mark the fault lines among people the external frontiers unite and unify (Stoler 2022). Those who strive to defend China’s internal frontiers set moral citizens off from immoral citizens, speakers of standard Mandarin as instructed in schools and promoted by state broadcasters from speakers of dialects. The preservation of internal frontiers leads to vigilance around the perceptions and practices that might lead to language degradation, desecration, and decay.
The Chinese Government’s battle to sanitise language is nowhere as visible as in the online realm, as Gabriele de Seta demonstrates in his essay. China’s internal frontiers are continually tested by China’s nimble netizens who play with language and subvert it in imaginative ways by developing neologisms, contorting expressions, mixing Mandarin with elements of foreign languages, and bending lexical conventions as they please, trying the patience of the censors who patrol the boundaries of permissible speech. Vulgarity is one register in which Mandarin speakers probe the limits of the linguistically tolerable, hewing a divide between an official world of governmental power and the unofficial carnival of subversion, as de Seta shows. However, boundaries are never stable. The government can coopt vulgar speech to control the discursive realm.
Where citizens can dispute or defy internal frontiers, they can also strengthen them. Chinese nationalism is challenging the previously elevated status of English, giving Mandarin new importance as a symbol of national pride. To what extent the popularity of English will be affected by nationalist sentiment remains to be seen, Eric Henry cautions in his essay. He cites a Chinese parent asking: ‘Can we really stop learning English?’ English, Henry shows, remains a vehicle for social and geographic mobility, an instrument of self-transformation, and an avenue to obtain a cosmopolitan identity and become a global citizen. Even so, Mandarin’s shifting status has gone hand in hand with a shift in English inside and outside China, sundering those who take pride in Mandarin and seek to lift its status and those who continue to embrace English.
Internal frontiers protect, preserve, and purify. In the realm of language, they ensure the protection of Mandarin as the sole national language, its preservation as a unified Standard (the capital ‘S’ suggests there is only one), and its purification from foreign elements. There is, however, one front where cultural preservationists and policymakers are fighting a losing battle. Technology, like mobility, poses a mounting challenge to Mandarin, as David Moser shows in his essay. The digital realm has given birth to ‘character amnesia’—a digitally induced syndrome that afflicts even language students and teachers at China’s top universities. Character amnesia is especially troubling to those who regard the practice of writing characters as a symbol of cultural and national identity. As Moser illustrates, concerted efforts to spur the zeal for writing characters, such as TV shows in which contestants compete in writing the most complicated characters, have not been able to stem the spread of character amnesia. Instead, they increase public awareness of how serious the problem has become. The digital revolution has created a paradox: while more and more people abroad acquire Mandarin and practise writing its characters, Chinese citizens are losing their ability to write in their native tongue.
Mandarin in Flux
This special issue of GCP brings into focus the politics of language and the geopolitical dimensions of Mandarin use, promotion, education, and translation. As its contributors show, global linguistic hierarchies and hegemonies seep into everyday encounters between Chinese tourists, traders, engineers, diplomats, businesspeople, customers, friends, and their Thai, Egyptian, Zambian, Kenyan, and Ghanaian counterparts. Language has the power to create, sever, strengthen, and destabilise bonds. Whereas the spread of simplified characters causes rifts between Chinese communities in Thailand, for instance, the playful use of Mandarin in Kenyan-Chinese encounters generates moments of proximity and intimacy.
Frontiers limit as much as they expand and exclude as much as they include. Those who seek to push or preserve frontiers mark off insiders from outsiders, familiars from strangers, and native speakers from non-native speakers. Yet, the unities and divisions frontiers produce rarely go uncontested. As Mandarin crosses regional or national borders, it encounters contrasting responses, from eager acceptance to stubborn resistance. In China, the embrace of regional languages, such as Cantonese, and the continued popularity of English challenge Mandarin hegemony, as does grassroots linguistic resistance in regions such as Tibet. Overseas, the informal flows of Mandarin give rise to translingual practices and even contact languages, as speakers seek to accommodate one another to enable business transactions, purchase services, facilitate construction work, or forge spiritual connections. Everyday linguistic encounters, whether inside or outside China, render the country’s linguistic frontiers dynamic spaces where the status and integrity of Mandarin are constantly negotiated.
