This is an edited version of one of my “Get Smart on China” emails sent to colleageus on June 30th 2015. Phil Nelson and Rindy Zhang also contributed to this Article
June 28th, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, began her commencement speech to Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management class of 2015 with an apology: “Unlike my boss, Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t speak Chinese.” Many of you may remember Mark’s debut as a Mandarin-speaking star during a Q&A session at Tsinghua University back in October 2014. “So how good is Mark’s Chinese?” you may ask.
Well the response from native speakers and foreign experts has been varied but probably everyone would agree Mark has some way to go before he can call himself fluent. While Foreign Policy’s Asia Editor, Isaac Stone Fish, (himself a Chinese-speaker) wrote rather uncharitably that Mark’s Chinese made him sound like an articulate 7-year-old with a mouth full of marbles, the Washington Post at least gave Mark credit for his bravery by comparing his effort to “taking an oral foreign language exam in front of dozens of native speakers and millions of people in the peanut gallery.”
But what about the native speakers of Chinese, who really know what “good Mandarin” is? Well the cheers and applause of the audience present during the Q&A session suggest that Mark’s Chinese was a success. His language may not have been very sophisticated, sticking to fairly basic vocabulary throughout the interview, but he has a pretty impressive grasp of grammar, one of the most important foundations for any language learner. Online comments have ranged from “Awesome!” to “I need subtitles”, but many are just happy that he’s made the effort to learn. The Chinese are quite aware of how difficult their mother tongue is for westerners, some even taking a certain amount of pride in this fact. But this also means that they are very appreciative and forgiving towards those brave enough to try speaking some; as many foreign visitors to China will know, just managing to spit out a barely comprehensible “ni hao” (hello!) will often elicit an exceedingly generous response along the lines of: “Oh, you speak such good Mandarin!” This might explain the excitement of the audience on hearing their business idol addressing them in their mother tongue.
The news outlet Quartz was perhaps unkind to remark that Mark’s “enunciation was roughly on par with the clarity possible when someone’s stepping on your face”, but it does focus on the main problem with his Chinese and one of the greatest challenges for learners: pronunciation, or more specifically, tones. Chinese uses the pitch of the voice (aka tones) to distinguish words that would otherwise sound the same. The word “wen” for example can mean warm, language, kiss or ask depending on which tone you use. Unfortunately, Mark’s neglect of the four tones used in Mandarin meant that at one point he said that Facebook has 11 mobile users instead of 1 billion. At other times he was almost incomprehensible. Happily, Mark hasn’t given up and even seems to have taken some of the criticism on board; in a video wishing Mandarin speakers a happy Chinese New Year his tones were noticeably better. One online commenter even remarked that in this second attempt he sounded like a speaker of Cantonese trying to speak Mandarin — a definite improvement.
Interestingly, Mark isn’t the only internet magnate showing off his linguistic skills. Jack Ma (one of the richest men in China and the founder of the Alibaba group — a successful platform of Chinese e-commerce sites) recently delivered a speech in English at the Economic Club of New York. Jack spoke fondly about his pre-billionaire life as an English teacher in the late 1980s and recalled those years as the best he’d ever had. And how is Jack’s English? Well the fact that he used to teach English for a living probably tells us that he is much less out of his comfort zone than Mark in a foreign language.
Other than being fond of learning and speaking a second language, and successful tycoons in the cyber space, Mark and Jack also have something else in common. They are both billionaires who are very passionate about philanthropic works and both sit on the board of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Philanthropy in the US is no new territory, but the topic is one of the hottest in China these days. In the short time that China has amassed the world’s second-largest pool of personal wealth, the country has demonstrated its potential to significantly increase the level and impact of charitable giving. In fact, Jack will be launching the first ever philanthropy summit in China this October. The entrepreneurial spirit among the first generation of wealth creators is good proof for the prospects of China’s philanthropic sector development.
In the recently completed “9.9 Internet Philanthropy Day” launched by Tencent, another internet Giant in the China, in the 3 days from Sep 7-Sep 9, Tencent committed to match 1:1 to those donate on Tencent’s platform to NGOs in, up to 100 Million RMB total (~16 M US) . During the 3 days, ~40 Million poeple donated a total of 640M RMB (100M USD), showing the scale and impact online platforms can have on the development of philanthropy sector in China.
