Fading Interest in Chinese Studies

The South China Morning Post is carrying a long and detailed report on the decline in foreign students studying Chinese.

‘Huge shift’: why learning Mandarin is losing its appeal in the West

thanks for sharing, Im not a subscriber, what were your main takeaways from the article?

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The increasingly restrictive environment as Beijing tightens its grip on national security has not helped.

This is perhaps the biggest issue, in my opinion. It's not just the slowing economy (study of Japanese remains fairly popular long after the bubble burst), it's that living, travelling, and working in China are increasingly difficult, unpleasant, and Orwellian. But I'm an optimist. Things have improved in the past, and they can again.

Thanks for posting @889. Interesting read.

>>"Fading Interest in Chinese Studies"

That's the title of the thread, but it could also be the heading for my most recent annual progress report. 

I can definitely relate to one of the points in the article, that Taiwan is much easier to navigate, both scholarship- and course-wise. But the article is also quite US-centric, focusing on the relations between US-China. In Europe the interest has stagnated quite a bit as well, but I think it has to do more with the imagined economic opportunities in China not being as prevalent as before. 

couldn't read the article - doesn't sound surprising in the current climate but also do these considerations apply to China only?

I feel this is in general a period of conflict and cultural, commercial and mental closure. If learning English wasn't strictly needed to find a job, how many people would be studying it now - after Brexit and Trump? 

Also, is it true that travelling in China is now harder than before? NZ and Australia now enjoy a 30 days visa waiver which is very handy. Working wise, what's changed for the worse (this is a genuine question)?

Not arguing that the current PRC government is open at all, but I'd like to understand if this pessimism is justified - especially compared say with the situation in other countries nowadays which also have taken "Orwellian" directions...

It does seem like we are in a dip in terms of positive feelings between China and the West right now, which has a knock on effect on how willing people are to take up the challenge of learning Chinese. It's a time sink, and if the cost is seen as a long term investment people will study, but in the dips not as many are willing while funding is pulled. I think things were quite similar in the 1960s where tensions were high between the US and China, but what did we get out of it? FSI courses and the Defrancis series, while in Cantonese we got the amazing Sidney Lau series, all sharing some relationship to government officials. Then things improved and the investment of those in the dip paid off. I would suggest now is a great time for new learners, as if they start now they should be able to ride the wave when international relations with China warms up a bit. In terms of learning materials, I could not agree more, the modern day offering for immersion in Chinese without going to China is very poor. I consume media pretty much only from the 90s-2000s, no steady stream of quality to be found unfortunately.

First time I've encountered the SCMP behind a pay wall. Maybe I was able to read their articles before because they were sending me things to whet my appetite. I'll look for this article offered through local surrogates.

Lately there seems to a bit of anti-Chinese sentiment floating around in Japan disguised as anti-foreigner sentiment. There's talk of a new government ministry intended to manage the relationship with foreigners already in Japan. As Chinese represent, by far, the largest group of real foreigners (not residents descended from an identifiable nationality), they would be the main responsibility of such a ministry.

The Chinese aren't helping themselves by arresting and imprisoning Japanese businessmen without proper explanation. And Japanese children have been the victims of non-random attacks in the last year or so. Japanese companies are reporting people refusing to accept assignments to China, something unheard of in the past.

Curiouser and curiouser...

TBZ

On 7/21/2025 at 9:22 AM, TheBigZaboon said:

First time I've encountered the SCMP behind a pay wall.

Yes, TBZ. They did that a couple years ago. SCMP is now locked up as tight as New York Times, not giving even a whiff of the article away. 

@Jezanese Got to agree with this. I do think that the censorship and overall control of the media leads to much less interesting media. As much as Korea has a surfeit of romance drama slop, it also has amazing shows like Squid Game and films like Parasite. As far as I know, nothing China has made in recent years comes close, and HK cinema is all but dead. It's a crying shame really. 

As someone who started my Chinese learning journey only a couple of years before Xi got in, I have to say I've cooled on China for those reasons as well. But I'm not sure it's harder to travel there. And I think some things like banking and overall accessibility have increased. But it's just remained less accessible than other comparable places as others have mentioned, combined with much weaker soft power precisely because they keep their creatives on such a short leash. There's nothing stopping China creating their own "Kpop" except their broader inability to be risqué. I'm not going to insist every country and culture does that, but it's always a choice and I suppose these are the results. 

Edit: The article is paywalled for me as well but I can see the first image showing the Chinese learning books gathering cobwebs while the Korean and other languages get picked up off the shelves. Anecdotally, they have very recently (probably a bit late tbh) massively cut down the Chinese language section in the flagship store of Foyles on Tottenham Court Road here in London, and used the space to expand the Korean language section. A very literal and concrete example of where things are going. Worth noting is how half the Korean language books link to K-dramas or K-pop in some way, while the Chinese books are generic or 'historical'. Korean is contemporary or even futuristic, while Chinese is stuffy and kind of boring. Even the historical Korean themed books are vibrant and linked to those costume dramas with bright hanbok. I don't remember seeing such equivalents for Chinese.

I find this surprising, because it seems that China's soft power is at last pretty well established: tik tok, videogames, many netflix tv shows, and even the awful dolls everyone is crazy about

I agree with most of what you're saying and lament these things often, however describing China as being 'substantially behind where we might expect them to be' is slightly dangerous wording. Perhaps China as a brand and a media producer is not where we wish they were, but the fact that everything is focused on the internal market is without a doubt intentional and 'power-granting' enough that international soft power is not seen as a desirable thing, rather it is transient and dependent on a currently unstable and unpredictable international community. China doesn't need to sell, and while that is not what people in the West studying Chinese would like, it's also part of the draw, and that draw will last longer than current trends.

That aside, I would love it if we could actually get some good media, been quite a few years since I've watched a good Chinese movie

@Tomsima Oh yes, to be clear, I'm not taking the position that it's where they should be. Like I said, it's all relative. I actually personally very much admire their small 'n' nationalism when it comes to many things, not least their refusal to be beholden to US tech and financial companies through social media and payment processors like Visa. As the unipolar global order centred on America breaks down, I think China will be uniquely placed to weather what comes - its size and significance aside - they've just made a lot of very smart moves and self-reliance is one of them.

From LTL Language School we can definitely there are fewer westerners interested in studying Mandarin today than pre COVID. The drop is quite significant. Almost all of our big competitors closed down during COVID, no new ones emerged and student numbers for LTL, even as the only real bigger Mandarin school surviving, are still down compared to 2019 in mainland China.

It got better this year over last, but overall the drop is quite remarkable. Had Hutong School etc. all closed in 2019 we would not have been able to cope with demand. As it stands today we easily can.

This might be different for people on scholarships who study at universities in big groups etc. but from developed countries the demand for high quality immersion Mandarin courses is nowhere near to what it was 5 years ago.

Hopefully that will change, but it might be a while.....

On 7/31/2025 at 7:52 PM, mikelove said:

Pleco sales are up by around 15% versus last year

oh thats encouraging! Do you think thats because more people study Chinese or just all the other apps have given up and finally accepted that Pleco is just the best on there is?

On 8/1/2025 at 4:37 AM, zhouhaochen said:

oh thats encouraging! Do you think thats because more people study Chinese or just all the other apps have given up and finally accepted that Pleco is just the best on there is?

I mean I guess there could be some benefit from the word of mouth circulating about 4.0 (we don't even have the beta signup posted on our website anymore and we still get signup emails) but I'm more inclined to think it's from people studying Chinese, yeah 🙂 The gains seem to be pretty widely distributed, most countries saw about the same increase, a few had big spikes (Netherlands, Thailand, Spain) and a few actually fell (UK, Japan) - the fact that the US was right about in the middle makes me think it's probably not weak-dollar-related, but there certainly could be an economic aspect to this if people are suddenly dusting off their Chinese (or starting to self-teach Chinese) because of various global trade scramblings.

Honestly, having just been back to China last November it's gotten relatively easy for foreigners to navigate again thanks to Alipay adding support for foreign credit cards; you definitely need someone to explain it to you if you don't speak Chinese, but after that you can pay like a local. There's even built-in translation support for restaurant menus, so you can customize your food court Lanzhou noodles without ever having to leave the app or interact with a human. So I'd like to think - hope? - that a second-order effect of whatever is causing this Pleco bump will be that more foreigners start seeing it as worthwhile to visit and study in China again. (for my own part I'm contemplating finally taking my kids there, COVID having hit right around the time I was originally planning to do that)