For a change, there’s been a somewhat interesting debate raging in the letters column of the SCMP over the past several weeks. It began when someone wrote in to complain that a friend who was otherwise 100% qualified for a particular job was turned down because this friend could not speak Cantonese. The most recent entry in this debate appears today, written by Ms. Cynthia Sze of Quarry Bay. Her letter:

Any open-minded person would find it perverse that English, the mother tongue of expatriates who account for 2 per cent of the population, has been imposed as the dominant language on 96 per cent of the population who are non-English-speakers. A minute English-speaking community presumes the prerogative that the indigenous population must learn English to entertain the purposes of expatriates but believes expatriates don’t have to learn the local language to understand the host society which accords them opportunities they could not find back home.

Reverse language discrimination which seemed politically correct under British administration is iniquitous. However, entrenched language discrimination has created unfair pecuniary and political advantages whose beneficiaries are now trying to argue that Hong Kong’s well-being depends on preserving the predominance of the English language.

Consider Mike Brooks’ letter (“Cultural mix”, July 28). It is asserted that Hong Kong’s pre-1997 success as an international city was due to its English-speaking population because English is “the world’s business language” and that with the departure of the British, post- 1997 Hong Kong has been plagued by incessant incidents of “incompetence” because the “Hong Kong Chinese way” hasn’t worked.

Such an ethnocentric assertion is ridiculous. A 1996 study by the National Foundation of Educational Research found that, while 29 per cent of the people in Hong Kong could speak English, most of them did not have a “firm grip” of the language, with only 2 per cent of the population using English as their usual language. If English language were the cause of international success, why haven’t Belfast and Birmingham, with their 100 per cent native English-speaking populations, made their marks internationally? As Hong Kong people learn to decolonise their mindset and the democratisation process speeds up, Chinese will inevitably replace English as the dominant language here. As the Chinese economy continues to grow from strength to strength, the Chinese language will gain importance in international business at the expense of English.

Geneva and Tokyo are first-class international cities where people don’t care about speaking English. Hong Kong’s colonial remnants have no more right to expect special treatment for English speakers in Hong Kong than in Europe, South America and Japan.

Mr Brooks and his like-minded compatriots should learn from Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved my Cheese? where it is stated: “If you do not change, you can become extinct.”

I think that this letter is wrong on many levels. One could go through it point by point (and I expect that some people will write in letters to the SCMP doing just that) but for me it comes down to this: English remains the dominant global business language and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

English remains an official language of Hong Kong. The majority of multi-national corporations continue to make English a requirement of employment everywhere in the world. An article in Wikipedia postulates that there are currently 1.186 billion English speakers globally. English is not going away any time soon. Regardless of what may or may not be happening in Belfast or Birmingham, in order for a city to be considered as a base for an MNC (and especially a regional base), there needs to be a pool of skilled workers who are also at least relatively fluent in English. If Hong Kong turns its back on English, as some would appear to advocate, it will lose some degree of competitiveness in the global marketplace.

As for claiming that people don’t care about speaking English in Tokyo, that may be partially true. But plenty of people do speak English there and even more are able to read and write it even if they can’t speak it.

And even if China does make the leap to a more dominant position in the world, the Chinese language that would dominate would be Mandarin, not Cantonese. And estimates show that half of the population of China does not speak Mandarin despite government efforts to the contrary.

Most ex-pats who come to Hong Kong don’t bother to learn the language because they don’t have to. They’re only going to be here for a couple of years and Cantonese is useless in the other places they’ll be posted or back in their home country. And while here, because English is an official language, it is possible to conduct all of one’s daily life in English. Even if that closes certain doors, which it does, most doors remain open.

Of course hiring companies are free to set whatever prerequisites they want for employment, within the law. Hong Kong law forbids discrimination on several fronts but “discrimination” based on language is not one of them. I sometimes think that Hong Kong firms make multi-lingual abilities a requirement as a kind of code meaning, “we want to hire someone local because they’ll work for less money than a foreigner.”

I recently came across a posting for a Hong Kong-based job with an American company. A position with regional management responsibilities (and by “regional” I presume they mean more territories than just Greater China) and frequent trips to the U.S. And in the list of requirements for the job, they included fluent English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Why do they need this? Will Cantonese or Mandarin be a necessity to manage some level of operations in Korea, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, even Singapore? So why is this a requirement? Doesn’t matter – they have the right to ask for what they see fit, even if it doesn’t appear to make logical sense to an outsider.

As for me, yeah, my Cantonese sucks. And I’ve been here for 12 years. My only excuses for not knowing more are just that – excuses. Yes, I’ve spent 50% of my time in Asia in places other than Hong Kong, places where Cantonese means nothing. I should have put more effort into it but I was lazy.

My Mandarin is on the verge of intermediate level. My teacher told me yesterday that she thinks if I can continue to progress at my current rate, within six months I should be quite good. (Of course she could be jiving me – she wants me to continue with lessons and she’s good at encouraging me to keep on struggling through.)

But at the end of the day, I realize that my lack of fluency in Cantonese may well prevent me from finding a job here. Moaning about this won’t get me anywhere. The fact remains that the great majority of open positions here that I might otherwise qualify for are closed to me because I have been lazy for so many years. I have painted myself into a corner, no one else has put me here but myself.

I may not like it. I may disagree with much of what Ms. Sze has to say. But I’m pragmatic. And I recognize that if I am not lucky enough to land one of the minority of positions where Chinese language skills are not a requirement, then I may well have to leave Hong Kong and go some place where the language is not a barrier to employment. I may not be happy about it, but that’s life, life’s tough, get a helmet and get on with it.

(I wanted to go a bit further with this but don’t have the time right now. Perhaps I’ll revisit this topic shortly.)