Chinese and English in Guangzhou

Roughly half the time I tell people that I speak Chinese, they immediately ask whether I speak Cantonese or Mandarin. I often take this to mean they know little about China or Chinese. I don’t mean any offense; most people never had occasion to learn anything about Chinese dialects because that knowledge had no value to their everyday lives. That said, it is always better to know something than not, so I invite my readers to consider this article as their occasion to learn a bit about Chinese dialects. Welcome to my crash course on Mandarin, Cantonese, and everything in between.

The current state that is called “China” did not always exist as a single, contiguous entity. The history of China is typically divided into dynasties, and while there are many dynasties that ruled over a unified China (particularly after the Mongolian-led Yuan Dynasty came to power in 1271), there were many dynasties which only nominally held power over de facto independent states, and several periods of no one dynasty in power at all. These various states were composed of different peoples, and they spoke different languages. As in Europe, the languages drew from the same family, but they could be more or less similar to other languages in that family. Some varieties of Chinese are mutually intelligible, but others are completely incomprehensible (for example, Mandarin and Cantonese; the saying “鸡同鸭讲,” pronounced jitongyajiang, means “like a chicken talking to a duck,” and describes the inability of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers to understand each other). You can see how it would be difficult to rule a country as large as China when its constituents can’t even communicate with each other, so throughout Chinese history the government made many attempts to nationalize a particular language. The most recent of these was in the early 20th century, near the end of the Qing Dynasty, when they proclaimed that the variety of Mandarin spoken in Beijing would be the official language in China. The Chinese word for Mandarin is 普通话, pronounced putonghua, which literally translates to “common speech.” Mandarin itself is not even particularly ancient, emerging around the twelfth or thirteenth century, and this variety of standard Mandarin is akin to Esperanto, a semi-constructed language designed to bring together people whose native tongues are all quite different. Mandarin stuck, and now the vast majority of Chinese people speak it, even if they also speak a different native language. The government, schools, and the media all use Mandarin. You can see how it is much more useful to learn than Cantonese, which is only one of several regional dialects.

Southern China in particular has many dialects. There really is no one unified "Chinese" language, but Mandarin connects people of many different native languages.

Why, then, is Cantonese so much more prevalent in the Western imagination than other dialects? Nobody ever asks me if I speak, say, Hokkien or Shanghainese, even though they have a similar number of speakers. It’s also not because Cantonese is especially different from Mandarin, because Hokkien and Shanghainese are also mutually unintelligible with it. The reason, I suspect, is that Cantonese is the language that English speakers have historically had the most contact with. The Mandarin name for Cantonese is 广州话, pronounced guangzhouhua, which literally means “the speech in Guangzhou.” Guangzhou is the capital of the Guangdong province, which just happens to be the province that borders Hong Kong and Macau. My theory is that English speakers know Cantonese because a lot of the earliest British presence in China was in parts of the country that primarily speak Cantonese. In fact, there is even a pidgin language that English speakers and Cantonese speakers developed to communicate more easily, and some English phrases (for example, “chop-chop” and “look-see”) come from it. Cantonese has definitely influenced English a lot more than Mandarin, even though Mandarin is easily the more important language.

I happen to live in Guangzhou. The most prominent languages here are, unsurprisingly, Mandarin and Cantonese. Third place goes to English. Before I came to China, my agent warned me that you can’t expect people to speak English in China the way you can almost anywhere else in the world. This was true, but it undersold the prominence of English. I was surprised by the sheer volume of English text you see on signs in Guangzhou — text which most of Guangzhou’s population can’t even read. I would conjecture that at least half of all stores and restaurants and government buildings either have English names or subtitle their Chinese names with English text. You could argue this is for the benefit of foreigners like me, and it’s true that Guangzhou has a lot of foreigners, but you still see English in some pretty bizarre places — like inside of my school, where I am the only foreigner, and I don’t think they put up English posters for me. There are certainly some instances where Chinese people use English for our sake, but I think another reason is that English is sort of fancy or exotic.

This is a stock photo, but it does a good job representing street signs in Guangzhou.

China has a tumultuous history with English. When the Republic was in power, many schools taught Western languages, but after the revolution they were replaced with Russian. When Russia and China broke ties, English crept back in, only to get removed once again following the cultural revolution. When reformist Deng Xiaoping took power, China adopted an “open door” policy, and English returned once again. Today, China serves two masters: it wants on the one hand to become the dominant world power, which necessitates learning the global lingua franca, and it wants to construct nationalist sentiment around Chinese. The compromise I see is a class system wherein a small number of wealthy Chinese people learn enough English to represent China on the world stage, and a much larger number of Chinese people are subtly dissuaded from learning it. That Chinese people don’t have access to the English language internet supports this theory. All of this is to say that Chinese people tend to associate English proficiency with the upper class, and that’s before getting into how they tend to venerate Europeans and white Americans, which is a topic I’d rather avoid here. That, alongside English’s alien nature, at least partially explains its popularity among a population that can’t speak it.

The interior of my school. I cannot imagine how anyone justifies the English on this banner.

Even though written English is absolutely everywhere, spoken English is pretty rare. It’s really hard to find hard data, and some estimates say that fewer than 1% of Chinese people speak English. I’ve met many more people who speak English than you’d expect given that statistic, but I do live in Guangzhou, which is one of China’s most international cities, and I fraternize with the sort of people who would speak English. Most of the English speakers I know have actually been to Britain or America. Many of the teachers at my school speak English, although I think they are mostly English teachers themselves. Most high-end businesses have one employee who speaks English that gets called upon whenever a foreigner appears. Anywhere else, though, you’re unlikely to find it. My Didi (Chinese version of Uber) drivers never speak English, nor do the people who deliver my orders from Meituan (Chinese version of Doordash). If you go to a fast food place, you won’t get an English speaking server. Same with the vast majority of stores, although I haven’t done much shopping since I’ve been here. Fortunately for me, I just so happen to speak a little Chinese myself.

People often express interest in how well I get by in China. I know my parents, at least, want to know how good my Chinese is so they know how hard to brag about me. Chinese people always tell me that I speak Chinese very well, which flatters but does not entirely convince me. There are three reasons I feel that my Chinese is not as good as they say. First, there’s the omnipresent element whenever you get a compliment that they could just be polite, which is made all the more troublesome because Chinese culture (really, East Asian culture in general) strongly emphasizes politeness. Reputation is paramount in China, and Chinese people will rarely damage it by criticizing you to your face, even constructively. Another reason is that they’re comparing me to other foreigners who, as I said in my last update, often don’t even try. Again, I sympathize with this because Chinese is extremely difficult to learn, but it does still irk me that you would live in someone’s country without even attempting to learn their language. Failure I can understand, but indolence I cannot. The last reason is that I am just a lot better at speaking than I am at listening, which might give the impression that I’m better than I am. 

So how is my Chinese really? I think it’s okay. I can have a conversation (although I need to get my brain into “Chinese mode” first), I can teach a lesson if I memorize the terms ahead of time, I can express my wants and needs, and most importantly, I can impress my friends. I am far worse at listening than speaking, probably because when I speak, I only use words and sentence structures I actually know. When I have conversations, I ask endless clarifying questions, trying to repeat what they said to me in my own words so I know I really understood. My vocabulary is limited. I am functionally illiterate, which is actually really common for people who speak Chinese as a second language. All that said, I can at least get by. I’m trying to get better. I take Chinese classes every week, and I do Duolingo every day (yeah, it’s not a great software, but it’s the best one I can use at work), and I learn a lot of Chinese just speaking to my students in class. Sometimes when I speak Chinese I feel like a superstar; sometimes I feel like an ignoramus. So it goes.

Contemporary Guangzhou is a romance of three languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. As a Chinese speaking American, I’m right in the crosshairs of all three. Before I even arrived in China, I knew language was one of the big topics I wanted to discuss, and I frankly haven’t even scratched the surface. When I’ve been here longer, and I know more, I’ll have to write more about it. My takeaway for now is that China’s nationalism and isolation do not conduce a good environment for learning English, nor do they make Chinese all that appealing to English speakers. It’s as though there are two different worlds — the English speaking world and the Chinese speaking world — and never the two shall meet. It’s a shame, because as much as these cultures have taken from each other, I think we could borrow still more. Although I respect China’s homogeneity, I think that it could stand to open up a little. The Great Firewall at least ought to come down. Until that happens, people like me will be islands of bilingualism in the great Mandarin sea.