Chinese: a new Esperanto for the minority languages of Europe? (4)

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.