Mandarin rides on economy

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: “Let China sleep, for when she awakes, the world will tremble,” said Napoleon famously, and indeed as the sleeping giant rouses, tremors are being felt throughout the world. From East to West, the seemingly inexorable rise of the Middle Kingdom, is drawing other nations to it, as a model for development, source and destination for investment and trading partner. The fear and distrust with which many used to regard the Mainland is increasingly being replaced by admiration, so that from Vietnam to India, through to far away Brazil, China is now being seen as presenting more of an opportunity than a threat. Growing apace with its rising economic and diplomatic strength is Beijing’s cultural clout or soft power. Soft power, a term coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, refers to a country’s ability to influence others by the attractiveness of its ideas and values. For decades it is a term that has primarily been associated with the US, given the ability of Hollywood glamour and Mickey Mouse cute to attract across borders and the importance of English as a global language.

However, as in the economic and political realms, the supremacy of US soft power is gradually being challenged by the might of Chinese culture and language. Across Asia, China’s cultural power is on display, exported through linguistic and gastronomic ties and consolidated through its overseas communities. Chinese tourism is burgeoning and it is visitors from the Mainland, rather than Japan that now constitute the dominant tourist group in Southeast Asia. Chinese cinema, art and traditional medicine are all booming globally. The escalating popularity of Mandarin Chinese is a case in point. Chinese is already the most spoken language in the world, with three times as many native speakers as English. Far from being geographically restricted to China’s immediate neighbourhood, its spread across the globe is being ensured by the Chinese diapora. Thus for example, Chinese is now the third most spoken language in Canada, following English and French. It is widely predicted that within a decade or so Mandarin will have overtaken English as the most used language on the Internet.