The language of business increasingly is
Chinese

Nonetheless, students more often choose Japanese - and may be missing an opportunity.

By Michael Dorgan

Knight Ridder News Service

BEIJING - When Andrea Goodman began studying Chinese at the University of California at Santa Cruz 16 years ago, it was on a whim. 

"I was not really interested in China," Goodman, 33, recalled. "I didn't know anything about its history, politics or culture. Then it took over my life." 

Today, Goodman's obsession is helping to pay her rent. As a corporate lawyer for the Beijing office of the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, she negotiates and reads contracts in Chinese. 

China's emergence as the world's fastest-growing large economy has meant that a lot of people around the world are following Goodman's lead. The Chinese "ni hao" is becoming a familiar "hello" in the global marketplace.

"If you want a future in business, China is definitely the place to be," Marie Seton O'Brien, a certified public accountant from New York, said during a break from her studies one afternoon recently at the Beijing Language and Culture University. 

Whether China can maintain its rapid economic growth is a question that keeps economists and political analysts hard at work. But it is beyond dispute that China's rise has shifted Asia's economic center of gravity, and, to a lesser degree, the world's.

South Korea, which for decades was dependent on exports to the United States, now ships more goods to China and Hong Kong than to the United States. Within five years, the same will be true for Japan, experts say. 

So it is not surprising that millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as a lot of Americans and others, are learning Chinese.

"For more than a dozen years, China's economy has been increasing by more than 7 percent per year," said Zhang Kai, an associate professor at Beijing Language and Culture University, China's leading school for teaching Chinese to foreigners and foreign languages to Chinese students.

"Because of that, communication between China and the world is increasing, and language is the key." 

The university had more than 6,000 foreign students studying Chinese until two months ago, when the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome shut down classes. Most students fled to their home countries, but many will return. 

O'Brien, 34, who did not leave China, came to Beijing in February, taking a break from her pursuit of a master's degree in business administration from Fordham University. 

"I decided that Chinese may be more valuable to me than the M.B.A.," she said. "There's no great call for M.B.A.s now."

Although more Americans and other foreigners are studying the language in China, Chinese still lags behind most foreign languages, including Japanese, in schools in the United States. 

Claudia Ross, chairwoman of the modern languages department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and a teacher of Chinese, said the popularity of Chinese language courses was growing in the United States but still was out of sync with the realities of globalization. 

"It is frustrating how few people realize the pragmatic reasons for studying Chinese," she said in an interview in Beijing, where she is doing research. "The money is here. The growth is here." 

Still, surveys show that, when high school students are asked which Asian language has the most practical benefits, they say Japanese, an answer 20 years out of date. 

A 1998 survey of foreign-language study at U.S. colleges and universities conducted by the Modern Language Association found that 28,456 students were enrolled in courses to learn the standard dialect of Chinese, up 7.5 percent from 1995. 

But 43,141 were enrolled in Japanese courses, and 656,590 were studying Spanish, the most popular foreign language for Americans. 

One reason more American students don't study Chinese is that it is difficult and time-consuming to learn. Spoken Chinese is filled with similar sounds distinguished only by tones that can be tough for nonnative speakers to distinguish. And Chinese has no alphabet; instead, it has thousands of characters that must be memorized. 

But Goodman, the lawyer, said studying Chinese was particularly important for anyone who planned to do business in China, which attracts more than $50 billion a year in foreign investment. 

"You are at a disadvantage if you don't know what's going on," she said.