Regina Ip Faces Down Hong Kong Chief Executive over Education

The only thing of interest that I got out of Hong Kong Legislative Council member Regina Ip's memorandum on education policy for Hong Kong was the apparent numerous opportunities for American and other for-profit programs to team up with partners in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s educational services, from primary to college level, are largely publicly funded. With a price tag of over $60 billions, it is the largest consumer of taxpayers’ money. With the community crying out for more publicly funded educational services to meet the burgeoning needs of a knowledge economy, more tax dollars are needed to pay for all manner of services, ranging from pre-primary school vouchers to school places for students with intellectual disability, university places for associate degree holders and bridging programs for those who failed to meet the minimum requirements of Secondary Six admission. Can a big spender like education be made to generate profits in the same way that private enterprises are supposed to?

I can't imagine that many Hong Kong people would be excited about using more of their tax dollars to make universities more competitive, or more prevalent. They are more inclined, I would think, in bringing in world-class partners who actually are more business-savvy, more flexible, and better at achieving scale and quality than those in the Pearl River Delta Region.

Hong Kong's taxes largely come from property sales. and there is usually always a surplus of government money. But they seem to be less inclined to pour that money into education. They are likely to pour that money into large-scale infrastructure projects, or team ups with China development companies building roads and other things like property developments or shipping ports, or bridges.

Cantonese Loses Ground to Putonghua in Chinatown

This article about the new dominance of Mandarin learning in New York City's China Town took me back briefly to a previous life.

I don't exactly agree with its premise, that Cantonese is being "swept away". Hong Kong has for it entire history has dealt with the seemingly always looming threat that the Cantonese culture and language is going to be eradicated by mainland Chinese influence, or some other global trend.

Three years ago, I moved into my first solo apartment in Hong Kong, and it was right across the school. I absorbed A LOT of Cantonese because in Hong Kong the teaching method is basically call and response learning -- you yell Cantonese words into a megaphone and wait for the children to shout them back to you.

Cute. But not at 8.15 am, long before I want to roll out of bed and go to work.

Having lived in Hong Kong, I can tell you that Hong Kong is a neighborhood language, spoken by a HUGE diaspora of Chinese immigrants who fled China or moved to the United States, Canada or other "western" countries in order to find a new life. No matter how many years these people will live away from Hong Kong or Guangzhou, it's my understanding that speaking Cantonese is a way of life.

So is the debate about the dialect's sustainability. Hong Kongers come from a place that is always rapidly changing -- the dialect itself is immensely fluid and flexible. There are young speakers of Cantonese today who speak a version of Cantonese that their grandparents don't even understand, and vice versa.

I think that the speakers of Cantonese in New York must be behaving pragmatically. It makes total sense to know Mandarin if you do business with China. And every country on earth does business with China.

Here's the link again: Learning Chinese in New York

Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants.

The change can be heard in the neighborhood’s lively restaurants and solemn church services, in parks, street markets and language schools. It has been accelerated by Chinese-American parents, including many who speak Cantonese at home, as they press their children to learn Mandarin for the advantages it may bring as China’s influence grows in the world.

When I was in China Town, I also heard Shanghaiese, Yunnan dialects, Taiwanese mandarin. But you also hear this in China, and in Hong Kong.

How to Become a Tutor In Hong Kong

The new scandal de jeur in Hong Kong is the rise of very wealthy tutors for public school students in the island territory just off the coast of China.

Hong Kong private tutor centers are cashing in on changes the public school system curriculum, but long before that, famous and sometimes notorious private tutors have been earning millions teaching students how to be successful at what is, very broadly speaking, a by rote and memorization school system in Hong Kong.

This is a touchy subject in Hong Kong. When vacationing students offer to help other students with summer school homework for money, people tend to get skittish and all sorts of moral volleys are lobbed each way and that.

But private forms of education, like many forms of business in Hong Kong, offer topographies for success in a purely capitalist system.

I was a private tutor once, and let me just demonstrate how easy it was to start up my own mini business while I went to grad school in the territory.

It took a few things:

1. Connections -- First and foremost, this is really how many people get anywhere in China and Hong Kong. I knew the wife of a pretty well-known Goldman Sachs director, who, after discussing with me my career options for funding my journalism degree at the local university, put in a polite word or two to six well-connected and wealthy business people near the Southern district of the island, where I lived at the time.

2. Credentials -- In addition to pursuing a second masters' degree, I had one master's degree in creative writing and a B.A in English literature from American universities. I also used to be a teacher. I spoke well, with a Midwestern accent. These really were all the credentials anyone needed. Just show off the degree.

3. Work Cheaply -- I started rates at only HK$400 an hour. That's about US$60 an hour. That is actually relatively cheap for a private English tutor in Hong Kong, someone who visits the home for one hour to one and a half hours a week.

In addition to providing my own transportation -- bus, taxi, or subway -- my other fixed costs were writing tablets to demonstrate handwriting and spelling techniques, novels and textbooks to provide lessons, and pencils and pens.

Really low overhead. I didn't have facilities I needed to maintain. I didn't have to register my name anywhere, or pay a licensing fee.

I am not sure if the same is true for the island's tuition centers, which line the streets of Wan Chai and offer everything from basic math and science tutorials to the big cash cow, English lessons. They even get their photo spreads on city buses.

Free market capitalism never had a greater market to generate profits. A tutor is portable, self-sufficient, and brand recognition all in one.

And it doesn't hurt that the Chinese value education and use it as a means to advance their life and career.