My Take | Learning Mandarin could be just the job
Hong Kong students who say it is a burden having to learn the language should look at the opportunities that lie ahead
It is truly bizarre for some university students in Hong Kong to think it’s an unjustified burden to make them achieve a degree of fluency in Mandarin. And there are even scholars who support them.
Let’s leave aside the pro- and anti-mainland politics and just ask, is having a language requirement unreasonable at a university?
My background is in history and philosophy. In my days in North America, we needed an additional language to graduate in philosophy, which usually meant German or French. It was the same with history. I think it’s the same today.
If you studied Chinese politics or history, Mandarin was a must. Every China specialist, those with a PhD in the field anyway, I have ever come across in Canada and the US speaks Mandarin; the only ones who also know Cantonese come from Hong Kong. However, Mandarin was and is the professional language.
When I became a reporter, I met foreign diplomats and business executives working in Hong Kong and the mainland. For most of them, learning some Mandarin was a priority, though knowing a bit of Cantonese was nice too.