Language Becomes a Real Issue

Filed in archive Law on July 19, 2007

Hats off to Richard Brubaker: I was looking at his blog today, All Roads Lead to China, and noticed his piece on the new requirement that you actually be able to speak Chinese in order to head a company in China.

We've discussed language in China before in relationship to outsourcing. But that discussion had to do with the ability of Chinese workers to speak English (or perhaps French, or German, or Japanese). New regulation, put into effect at the end of 2006, require that senior executive in China pass a financial knowledge test - administered in Chinese. The story became news because the Goldman Sachs joint venture in China was slated to be taken over by a new CEO who can't pass the test.

The real irony is that the candidate Goldman Sachs had in mind is Chinese - ethnically, at least. Richard Ong, the Goldman Sachs candidate, is a Malaysian citizen who (I'm guessing) probably grew up speaking a southern dialect like Cantonese or Hokkien at home. Education in Malaysia emphasizes the Malay and English languages, though some instruction in written Mandarin is available. Ong had been in Beijing for six months. Most of the sources (including the Financial Times, who broke the story a few days ago) act like Ong couldn't pass the test because either his spoken Mandarin or his skills in reading Chinese were insufficient. I suppose it is possible that his financial knowledge was insufficient, but reading Chinese and speaking conversational Mandarin are not necessarily interlocking skills...

The post at All Road's Lead... is insightful analysis of the situation.