Our Desk | Macau’s Mandarin is good enough

Julie Zhu

During yesterday’s Legislation Assembly plenary meeting, lawmaker Lei Chan U used his standard Mandarin to urge the Macau SAR government to more thoroughly educate its citizens in regard to Mandarin speaking skills.

According to Lei’s data, in the academic year of 2016/2017, 24 percent of Macau’s Chinese teachers were teaching Chinese using Mandarin as the medium of instruction. As he then argued, the mastery of spoken Mandarin has already become a basic skill of employees within Macau’s tourism and gambling sectors and other relevant industries.

Lei also pointed out that research shows 90 percent of the gaming industry’s job vacancies required Mandarin skills, with the percentage soaring even higher (up to 97.6 percent) in the banking industry.

In view of these reasons, the lawmaker believes that any Macau resident, especially younger ones, who have a dream to build a successful career must first master Mandarin.

Lei is not the only person who deems Mandarin skills an important factor for Macau residents. There are many other people who think like Lei: people from the Chinese communities, people from mainland China, from Macau, from Hong Kong, and even people from other regions and countries.

Personally, I agree that Mandarin is likely to be more valuable than other Chinese dialects.

However, I stand on the other end of the spectrum in relation to the reasons presented by Lei. I would not encourage a host to learn a language in order to serve their guests. Instead, I think it is a better idea for a guest to learn a language when visiting a host.

According to the opinions of several of the city’s lawmakers, Macau is a host city where people should learn a language to cater to the interests of their guests.

Does Macau need, as the host, to master Mandarin? I would say not.

First, to some degree, it is the differences, singular characteristics, and uniqueness that attract people and leave them with special memories and wanting to go back to a place. Based on my knowledge of Mainland Chinese tourists, I strongly feel that people prefer Hong Kong to Macau. Nonetheless, one of the very first comments I hear from these tourists is that “Macau speaks good Mandarin.”

The tone and the way they make this remark on Macau’s good Mandarin does not sound like a good thing. It feels more like an obvious acknowledgement. It’s as if these mainlanders, when they visit Macau, feel like there is nothing special about the city (besides some of the Portuguese heritage and the casinos). Therefore, they do not feel they have not stepped into something different from the place where they come from.

On the other hand, I frequently hear people saying that Hong Kong people don’t speak Mandarin, but the tone in people’s words suggests that Hong Kong really attracted them because it made them realize that perhaps Hong Kong has “proud bones” (in Chinese culture, people who have proud bones stand straight and firm against things, whereas people with a proud attitude are just ignorantly arrogant with no capabilities whatsoever), which leaves tourists with a good impression. 

Finally, language is not a barrier stopping people from visiting other places. Chinese tourists, for instance, have never stopped going to other countries because of language differences. In fact, if we look at the statistics, the data shows that the number of Chinese tourists travelling abroad has been growing continuously.