Last fall, the New York Times published an article describing the rising importance of Mandarin in Chinatown. This seemed to offend travel writer Daisann McLane, an avid student of Cantonese.  She insists that Cantonese is flourishing and cites her time with certain infamous Hong Kong politicians in New York’s Chinatown as evidence of such Cantonese.  She’s wrong. Cantonese’s days are numbered.

I live in Canton (Guangzhou), which, unlike McLane’s Hong Kong, is the home of Cantonese’s prestige dialect where I have run a business for the past 3 years. I am fluent speaking, reading, listening and writing in Mandarin including obscure IT/tech vocabulary that the average Chinese does not know. I spend in excess of 90% of each day speaking only Mandarin or Cantonese and I spend zero time interacting with Guangzhou’s expat community. While learning Chinese, I spent significant time in class with the  Chinese immigrants and their children in New York City and other Chinatown.

And now for 7 reasons why Cantonese is dying…

1. Everyone in Canton speaks Mandarin

It is impossible to only speak Cantonese in Guangzhou.  Several Hong Kong and local Guangzhou friends of mine have tried this out only to find out rather quickly that they need to either break out their rusty Mandarin or get another cab.

A friend of mine who was born and raised in Guangzhou and attended Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, a native Cantonese, spent the good part of a decade abroad in graduate school in upstate New York only to return to be shocked how the language dynamics of his hometown had changed and his native Cantonese was no longer the only game in town.

2. Everyone in China speaks Mandarin

Learning Cantonese writes:

Still, despite more than 50 years of official support, education, and with all the levers (sic) of the central Chinese government pushing the primacy of Gwok Yu (national language), Mandarin is the first language of a whopping 40% of all Chinese. (It’s spoken by just 70% of Chinese, which is still an astonishing figure, given the primacy of putonghua.

Getting 70% of any population to do anything is impressive. Getting 70% of 1.3 billion people (in)famous for not following rules to do anything is nothing short of a miracle.

Who are the “just 70%” of Chinese that speak Mandarin?

• the business, political and academic elites
• all students
• the entire workforce
• anyone who has gone to school since the mid-20th century.

The 30% that don’t speak Mandarin are economically and politically irrelevant because they’re for the most part out of the workforce.  They spend their time at home and their only interaction outside of their generation is constrained to their own children and grandkids, all of which are among the 70% that speak Mandarin.  The 30% that don’t speak Mandarin will be dead in the next two decades.

3. Mandarin is the language of business and money

Mandarin is to China what English is to the rest of the world. Those who want to be successful and make money speak Mandarin.  When a Cantonese person gets together with someone from anywhere else in China to do business, have fun or even get married, they speak Mandarin and not Cantonese.

When Sir Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR Government travels from Hong Kong to Beijing to talk policy, you can bet he’s speaking Mandarin and Hu Jintao and his underlings are not speaking Cantonese.  Money and power is ultimately controlled by Beijing.

When a Cantonese and a non-Cantonese start dating during college, guess what they speak? You guessed it…

4. New York Chinatown Kids Speak English Not Cantonese

The children of those oft-cited Cantonese and Fujianese speaking immigrants in New York’s Chinatown speak English not Cantonese and Mandarin with everyone except their parents. Almost all are illiterate in Chinese.  The few that try to learn written Chinese usually give up pretty quickly. Many of them were my first year Chinese classmates.

When these first generation children of Chinese immigrants get married and have kids, they speak English with their spouses, friends and coworkers. If they can manage to convince their children to learn Chinese, it will be Mandarin, not Cantonese.

This is no different than any other immigrant story. My great great grandparents spoke Italian.  Did my grandparents? A few phrases. Do my parents? No. Do I? No.

5. Kids play in Mandarin

Spend time in the courtyards and elevators of Guangzhou’s developments and you’ll find that when local kids play with kids from other provinces, their games are in Mandarin.  Their cartoons are also in Mandarin.  In fact Guangzhou and Guangdong children’s channels are also in Mandarin.

6. Entertainment is in Mandarin

Of 80+ cable TV channels in Guangzhou, less than 10 are Cantonese, 3 or 4 are English and the rest are Mandarin. Even the majority of Guangzhou TV, Guangdong TV and Southern TV’s channels are Mandarin and not Cantonese. As someone who is studying Cantonese, I often go out of my way to track down the original Cantonese version of Hong Kong movies.  It is much more difficult than you would think this being the birthplace of Cantonese.  You have to go out of your way to find original Cantonese movies because most DVD vendors just carry Mandarin dubbed editions.  A Mandarin edition can be sold nationwide. A Cantonese edition is worthless outside of Guangdong Province.

7. Mandarin is taking over Hong Kong

The average Hong Kong person’s English is not good. If you try to get along solely on English, it doesn’t work very well outside of expat-frequented areas. You are much better off simply speaking Mandarin. Cab drivers and cashiers in Hong Kong who speak and understand little to no English will understand exactly what you say in Mandarin.

Go into any Hong Kong government office, Inland Revenue, Immigration Department, the Companies Registry, you pick, and try to conduct your business in English.  Then try again in Mandarin.  Mandarin works every time, while English is very hit and miss.

More than 13.5 million mainland tourists visited Hong Kong, 100% of them speak Mandarin and they have cash to spend.  Hong Kong’s population is only 1/2 of that.  Hong Kong businesses are pretty squarely focused one the 1.3+ billion strong mainland market and that requires competency in Mandarin.

In fact, in 2007, Hong Kong’s Education Chief told schools to teach more in Mandarin and English and less in Cantonese. In the Hong Kong Government’s view, better English helps Hong Kong maintain its international competitiveness and better Mandarin helps Hong Kong to be more competitive in mainland China.  Any chance Beijing’s Minister of Education will be telling schools to teach more Cantonese to help mainland competitiveness in Hong Kong and Chinatown? There’s better chance the Great Firewall be dismantled tomorrow than that happening.

In Defense of Cantonese

I love Cantonese. Its a beautiful and incredibly fun language. I decided to study it because I enjoy it.  But I don’t delude myself into thinking its a good investment in the future beyond its entertainment and academic value.  Enjoy it while it lasts.

All of our internal production sites starting in 2009 have been launched with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 from day one.  We typically serve static assets (images and javascript) from our content delivery network to improve load performance.  Unfortunately, the CDN we use is IPv4 only. The following Ruby on Rails code snippet is from /config/environments/production.rb that rewrites static asset paths to serve from the RoR server for IPv6 and SSL requests and the CDN for IPv4 requests.

ActionController::Base.asset_host = Proc.new { |source, request|
remote_ip = IPAddr.new(request.remote_ip)
if request.ssl? || remote_ip.ipv6?
"#{request.protocol}#{request.host_with_port}"
else
# replace your.cdn/path with the host + path to your IPv4-only CDN
"#{request.protocol}your.cdn/path"
end
}

You should be worried when the CEO of Beijing’s largest real estate company Zhang Xin has this to say:

My view is that the real estate business has a lot of asset bubbles, but even with asset bubbles it doesn’t mean that we are getting out of the business. The strategy is not giving up or leaving, the strategy is to keep a lot of cash, to sell as fast as possible, and to turn around assets faster – even faster than before.

She points out that rent is way too low for the prices at which properties are selling:

Now, if you look at the prices for the property being sold versus the rent you collect there is a real disconnect. Prices are too high, rent is too low, so if you hold property in order to get yield you are likely to get very little. For us it makes no sense to hold property, so our strategy is to sell everything. We see ourselves very much as a manufacturer. We buy land, we build, and then we sell. And the asset bubble has compelled us to be even more of a manufacturer.

If property developers who are interested in long-term income streams won’t even consider holding on to their own properties…should you?

Read the whole interview for more of her thoughts! Thanks to Twitter Niubi for pointing this interview out!

Quick post as I wait for my 12 inch 1/2 chicken curry 1/2 pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut to be delivered here in Guangzhou:

I was reminded tonight, yet again, by Papa John’s nationwide delivery hotline why Pizza Hut does so much better in the China market.

1. They accept credit cards. It is 2010 folks…even in China few people pay in cash for middle and upper end eating out (in which Papa John’s with its 100 CNY+ pizza prices most definitely falls.) You don’t need to accept international cards (Visa, Mastercard, etc…even though Pizza Hut does), but at least accept China Unionpay! If mom & pop outfits accept Unionpay for sales of 10 CNY or less, Papa John’s surely can find a way.
2. Their delivery people don’t turn your pizza upside down in route.
3. They don’t randomly stop offering sizes and crusts (such as the 12 inch traditional crust) in conflict with their online menu and published promotions.
4. They accept online orders.
5. Their nationwide toll-free delivery line actually takes orders for the whole period of time that its open instead of stating that the delivery line is open until 10pm but telling people who call at 9:53pm that their locations don’t accept orders after 9:55pm.  (???) Additionally, they don’t, after having the ridiculousness of this pointed out, say that they will place the order anyways but if the pizza doesn’t show up, the customer will have to deal with the store.
6. There is actually some degree of product consistent between locations unlike Papa John’s where pizzas from different locations taste totally different.

In Papa John’s defense, their pizzas generally do taste better.  However, I’m not going to order them if its such a hassle. This isn’t some deep insight from a business China expert…its common sense.

I woke up today to the headline that Google is threatening to leave the China market in response to what it says were a series of attacks aimed at the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

First, I must admit that I am a big fan and heavy user of Google’s services.  Our company uses many Google services on a daily basis and I hold Google stock. However, today’s move, smells strongly of a brilliantly crafted marketing ploy generate PR or perhaps even a way to leave the China market without admitting failure.

My first reaction was along the lines of this twitterer.  Finally, someone is willing to take a stand against injustice and the hassle China makes foreign businesses go through. However, after reading some additional coverage, watching Larry Kudlow’s interview of Google’s Chief Legal Officer on CNBC and discussing this news item with people both in and out of China, it became apparent that my initial impression may have been incorrect.

In fact, today’s announcement seems to indicate Google has learned a lot more about China and Chinese culture from its China experiment than others give them credit.

Google’s China Lessons

1. One of the quickest ways to gain popularity among the masses is to be banned
2. Find a way to save face when confronted with defeat

The Marketing Allure of Forbidden Fruit

Google has learned what many other successful Chinese businesses, artists, authors and musician long since known. One of the best ways to get your product to become extraordinarily popular is to get it banned by the government.  Books like Shanghai Baby and the extraordinarily popular TV drama Woju（蜗居）which details the story of a young girl who became the mistress of a corrupt Communist Party official were partially or completely banned and consequently soared in popularity.

In the short term, today’s news will without a doubt cause many who would typically just use Baidu to give Google China another try simply to see what all the fuss is about it. In the long term, if Google makes good on its threat, Google.cn is shut and the US-based Google.com is subsequently blocked,  you can be sure more people than ever in Mainland China will be use ever more creative ways to access the US-based search engine and other Google services to see what is being hidden from them.

Failure in the Chinese Market

Despite Google’s popularity abroad, outside of Google of China’s IT industry, very few Chinese use Google services.  Among my 100s of contacts in Mainland China, ranging from those in high government and Party positions to simple uneducated workers from the countryside who use email, I can count on one hand the number that use Google’s Gmail service.  Among those, all except for one are people who have lived and/or studied outside of China at some point. Besides a few users of Yahoo China’s email service, the remainder use one of the home-grown email providers such as 163.com or the built-in @qq.com email with which, every user of insanely popular, homegrown QQ chat network is provided..

Language provides a lot of insight into Google’s position in various markets. Much like “google” used as a verb has made its way into English vocabulary as a word to mean “to use Google to search the web for something,” Baidu plays a similar role in Chinese.  Their slogan Baidu Yixia, Ni Jiu Zhidao (百度一下，你就知道) which means “Baidu a little bit and you’ll know” is one of the better know corporate slogans in China up there with McDonald’s “I’m Loving It.”

Some of Google’s services do not even work properly in China through no fault of the Chinese Government.  For example, the map view of Google Maps on the iPhone is consistently about 3 kilometers off in Guangzhou when displaying current location despite the fact that the satellite view is dead on. This makes Google Apps essentially useless for finding or following directions in South China. It is as if no one from Google has ever tested this product in Guangzhou despite the fact that this is arguably Mainland China’s most important city in the southern half of the country.

Google China’s much touted music download service created to compete with the extremely popular, easy to use and very useful Baidu MP3 service which allows users to download MP3s of the latest music for free has never worked from our China Unicom leased line in Guangzhou with their music supplier’s servers always indicating that our IP block did not have permission to access the music files required to use the site.  This may have been because Google was trying to err on the side of caution when setting up IP access parameters to in order to avoid allowing free downloads of music outside the Mainland China market and incurring the wrath of their music label partners. However, the reality of the situation is that if it didn’t work for me on 1 of my 2 internet connections in Mainland China, then there were probably many others who had the same problem. Like me, they probably tried the service once or twice, ran into a problem and then gave up and went back to Baidu MP3.

For most companies, a user base of Google’s size in Mainland China would be considered a success.  But the fact of the matter is, Google’s wild success and huge market share in other countries around the world means that in comparison Google’s China operation with its tiny market share and near irrelevance to the daily life of normal Chinese makes it a large failure.

In their battle to win market acceptance and work towards the market share numbers they enjoy in other markets, Google has had to re-develop most of their services specifically for the Mainland Chinese market to cater to different customer tastes and comply with a significantly different regulatory environment.  The result of doing so has been a less than tepid response from Chinese Internet users.

Saying they are threatening to close down their China operations because of China cyberattacks and government censorship is ingenious at best.  How would shutting down their China operations prevent future cyberattacks from in China on its US-based servers? The answer is that obviously it wouldn’t. The government censorship excuse is weak because Internet censorship now is to a large part much less stringent than it was when they entered the China market.  Major foreign news sources have very rarely been blocked in the past year or so unlike in years past when they entered the market.

The only thing that has changed is that Google’s China operation has gained a track record of little success over the past several years. They have run numerous campaigns to promote g.cn and google.cn (eg. ads through the Guangzhou Metro, on every bus stop, and many TV stations) with little success. Someone internally has probably decided that their little progress is not worth the cash cost of the China operation and the large PR cost of being seen by some as doing the dirty work of the Chinese Communist Party. So instead of admitting defeat and tarnishing their brand’s image of success, they instead have chosen to blame the Chinese government and use this as a face saving way to wrap up a failed operation under the guise of “Doing no evil” and human rights. The only thing better from a PR perspective would be to figure out how to spin the closing of their China operation as being “for the children.”

No, Google’s threat to leave the China market was not made because of some higher moral calling but instead was a carefully crafted business decision to make one last attempt to generate interest in their China services before throwing in the towel and doing so without hurting the Google brand’s image of inevitable success. Look at it in another way…do you think Google would even think about threatening to close down its China operations if it had already cornered 90%+ of a market over 300 million users strong? I don’t think so.