TheEconomistNovember 28th 2020 351A
merica’s president-elect, Joe Biden,
says China is his country’s “biggest
competitor”. Yet China’s centrality in the
calculations of foreign-policy experts in
Washington and throughout the West is
hardly matched by the interest shown in
academia. Despite China’s efforts to pro-
mote interest in the language—and a surge
of attention to it in Western schools a few
years ago—enthusiasm for China studies at
university level remains lacklustre. Fear of
China, and restrictions imposed by it, are
in part to blame.
In Britain the number of people study-
ing China at university has dipped each
year since 2017. Last year it fell by 90 to
1,434, according to the Universities’ China
Committee in London, which promotes
China studies in Britain. In Australia a sur-
vey last year of 16 academics involved in
China studies suggested a similar trend.
One of the scholars said the number of Aus-
tralians studying Chinese or China-
related topics at university had “obviously
decreased” in the past five years. Another
lamented a “gradual hollowing out” of Chi-
na expertise in Australia.
At American universities enrolments in
Chinese-language programmes reached
60,000 in 2013. Three years later a fol-
low-up survey found they had fallen by
more than 8,000. Students with a serious
academic interest in China usually spend
time on a campus there. In 2011-12 almost
15,000 Americans did so. By 2018-19 the to-
tal number of Americans studying abroad
had risen by 20%. But in China their ranks
had shrunk by the same proportion, de-
spite an effort by Barack Obama, when he
was president, to encourage more Ameri-can students to go there. This does not bode
well for building expertise in a country that
is so important to American interests.
There are several reasons why students
in the West are lukewarm about focusing
attention on China. The first is one that has
always plagued this academic field—a high
barrier to entry in the form of a language so
different from Western tongues, requiring
the memorisation of hundreds of charac-
ters in order to acquire basic literacy. Those
who study Chinese at school often learn
only enough to discover just how challeng-
ing mastery of the language is.
A related problem is that many native
speakers of Mandarin graduate from uni-
versities in China and the West with a flu-
ent command of English. In Western busi-
nesses, opportunities for work requiring a
command of Mandarin may have grown in
recent years, but so too has competition for
such jobs. People who have grown up in
China often have an advantage, not only
with language but also in their ability to
open doors in China for their employers.
More recently, China’s increasingly re-
pressive political climate has become a
powerful deterrent to those mulling the
subject. Last year King’s College London
tried to set up an undergraduate degree in
Chinese language, but abandoned the plan.
The faculty found that demand for an exist-
ing degree in Japanese was far higher. “Peo-China studies
Barriers to Sinology
HONG KONG
As China’s power waxes, the West’s study of it is waning. That is worrying
China
36 Romanceontelevision
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