To return to the Dublin conference: on occasions as these representatives of Confucius Institutes of smaller nations quickly find each other on some common issues and concerns. First of all, smaller nations often have only one, at best two or three Confucius Institutes. In larger countries, Confucius Institutes can join in national associations. Within each network each particular Confucius Institute can develop its own strengths and excel above the other Confucius Institutes in her own way. For example, if “business” is what you’re best at, you can earn yourself a reputation within your country as the best “Confucius Institute for Business”. In smaller countries, it is often not possible to set up local networks. Here you are alone as a Confucius Institute.

One of smaller Confucius Institutes’ representatives favorite places to meet at Confucius Institutes conferences is the booth with sample Chinese language manuals. Most of the Chinese manuals adopted in courses use English or other international languages as a third language. This is also because most of the teachers sent from China also use this language to teach. Few to no teachers from China have studied Bulgarian, Romanian or any other small language before. At present Confucius Institutes can apply for Chinese teaching materials from China in many dozen smaller languages and virtually all European languages. Yet the choice of titles remains limited. Many of these manuals are sheer translations from English, while a speaker of another language may have difficulties with Chinese that are specific to his or her own language.

Our conversations at the small languages teaching materials booth also focus on numbers and the problem of achieving targets. Smaller countries have a harder time raising the number of Chinese language learners than larger nations, just because of the smaller number of population (Slovenia, for example, has one Confucius Institute for slightly more than two billion inhabitants). Primary and secondary educations in these countries often already are overcharged with language courses. If you succeed in offering Chinese in secondary schools, the time allotted for Chinese is often just not enough for more than a very elementary introduction to the Chinese language. Studying Chinese often requires a greater amount of time than most schools are prepared to allot to Chinese. Some pupils may, in the future, resume their study of Chinese. For most pupils the Chinese language courses will remain a mere “appetizer”.

What is the sense of teaching Chinese to pupils in a small country somewhere in Europe who may never use it to communicate with native Chinese speakers? What is the return on investment in such case? I myself do think that it is better to aim for large numbers of pupils and students of Chinese, in the hope that, in the end, this will generate a proportionally higher number of speakers of Chinese. I also agree that Chinese is becoming an increasingly more important tool of communication. Mutual trade and international exchange with China benefits from a higher number of Chinese second language speakers in a country. Looking at the matter from the Chinese side, higher numbers of students of Chinese strengthen are the most direct way to strengthen China’s “soft power”: a new student of Chinese is a potential new friend of China.

Let us, for a change, make abstraction of all the trade and economic considerations and see what else Chinese can mean in Europe, particularly for the smaller language groups in Europe. In one particular sense the proliferation of Chinese language teaching in certain smaller countries of Europe is a way in which the “Chinese dream” has come to Europe. From China’s top leaders down to students worldwide studying Chinese, the word has become a sort of common-place. For smaller language groups the “Chinese dream” reminds of another dream, a dream that once inspired Chinese and Western people alike, that of the international language Esperanto.

Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by the Polish doctor Zamenhof in an attempt to create a new universal language. Zamenhof created Esperanto in a linguistic environment that very much resembled the present linguistic map of Europe. He was fluent in Lithuanian, Russian, German, French and Polish and constructed Esperanto as a tool of communication between communities. Zamenhof’s intention was to create a language that would be truly neutral by selecting its vocabulary and its grammatical rules from all possible languages. Esperanto was later blamed for being too Eurocentric, ignoring languages outside Europe. Zamenhof’s ideal of bringing peace among nations through one single constructed language has long been abandoned but the dream still stands. I would not go as far as to claim that Chinese is the new Esperanto, but I do believe that there are interesting parallels and that at certain points Chinese may make up for expectations that Esperanto failed to meet.

Will Chinese in Europe realise the potential that once lead doctor Zamenhof to create Esperanto? One thing which is certain is that Chinese has the potential to unite groups across national and linguistic lines of divide. Smaller language groups in Europe find in Chinese a global language that rather than supplant the existing linguistic diversity in Europe acts as a sort of ally against languages such as English that increasingly impose themselves as the single tool of communication in Europe. Furthermore, Chinese in Europe has also the advantage of being an outsider. Chinese is not linked to one particular country of native speakers in Europe and in that sense it is neutral. Critics will point out that you cannot think away Chinese culture from Chinese language, suggesting that you cannot introduce Chinese to schools in Europe without “forcing” China’s culture onto pupil’s mind. If culture refers to Chinese characters I do not see what would be wrong with that. Anyone who has once ever organized a Chinese calligraphy fair in Europe will know much the Chinese characters are a bridge between speakers of various languages. Chinese, through its ideographical script is the only language that can bring together speakers of languages without one having to sacrifice his language to another and without having to recur to a single, dominant language. I do not know what doctor Zamenhof would have thought about the spread of Chinese through the Confucius Institutes in Europe but I think he would certainly have shared our dream. 

Philip Vanhaelemeersch, the author of this article is the president of the Confucius Institute at Howest, Belgium