The Government must review whether university courses in Chinese Studies need targeted funding to address a lack of “China competency” across the population, researchers have said.
A study by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), published on Thursday, said the Office for Students should review whether Chinese Studies needed additional funding because of the low levels of demand from school leavers for courses related to Chinese language and culture.
The report found the number of Chinese Studies students has not increased in the past 25 years, with a corresponding decline in Chinese Studies departments offering single-honours undergraduate degrees, falling by a third from 13 to nine between 2019 and 2020.
While there has been £50 million of public and private investment in Mandarin teaching for schools, the Pre-U qualification in Mandarin Chinese will close in 2023, so pupils will only be able to study Mandarin via an A-level course which is mostly taken by native speakers.
I think the lack of China literacy poses specific risks to UK higher education and research
Michael Natzler, the report’s author and a former HEPI policy officer, said the number of British graduates gaining a level of expertise on China remained “really low” and the lack of Mandarin speakers in the UK was likely costing the country hundreds of millions of pounds each year.
He said the report highlighted a lack of demand from school leavers for further study about China, and this was linked to a lack of exposure to Chinese culture, language and history whilst at school.
The report said a new A-level in Chinese Civilisation would help open up the study of China to a wider range of young people.
“The most compelling of all ways (to introduce pupils to Chinese culture) in schools is to explore the idea of an A-level Chinese Civilisation,” he said.
“A useful parallel might be A-level Classical Civilisation which opened up Classics at university to thousands of people who did not have the option to study Latin and Greek at school, or who didn’t have the language skills or experience learning languages which they might need to tackle a famously difficult language, in this case, Chinese Mandarin.”
He said GCSE and A-level curricula were often not suited to the study of non-European languages, for example those with a different alphabet, and the Department for Education needed to review how languages were examined.
Former universities minister Lord Jo Johnson said the report highlighted the “high price” the UK would pay for neglecting languages and it was “extraordinary” that language teaching was being allowed to decline towards “extinction”.
He said he supported the idea of an A-level in Chinese Civilisation and the lack of knowledge about China posed particular risks.
“I think the lack of China literacy poses specific risks to UK higher education and research,” he said.
“We’ve got to recognise that the large numbers (of students) from China have the potential to become something of a double-edged sword for the sector if the geopolitics harden unexpectedly and undesirably,” he told an online webinar.
He said the UK was clearly “very lucky to have a large number of brilliant Chinese students in this country from whom domestic students can learn about China second-hand”, which he added was a “priceless living bridge between our two countries”.
But he added that a “significant number of prestigious institutions in the elite Russell Group that would be holed below the water line financially in the event of a sharp downturn in student numbers from China, yet are doing as far as I can see next to nothing to insure themselves against a risk of a sudden hardening of the geopolitics”.
The report suggested a small pot of funding should be made available to support the training of teachers in modules on modern China, which was “largely absent” from school curricula.
The report said that academic freedom for China specialists was a “complex matter”.
It used the example of a Hong Kong postgraduate student wishing to write about the history of protest in China at their UK university.
While they would be free to do so, if they returned to Hong Kong they could run the risk that they or their family faced harassment. Their supervisor might advise them to write on a different topic for their own wellbeing.
“As such, the bullying tactics of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) do influence the study of China within UK universities,” the report said.
It said universities must be clear on their policies on academic freedom, and they should be “more transparent about donations from external sources, including businesses, the Chinese Communist Party or organisations close to it as well as Confucius Institutes”.
