The school
is one of several that have popped up on the same busy road in the Cambodian
capital in recent years. Brightly coloured signs splayed with Chinese script
tower above the traffic. Inside, the aging building is a warren of
interconnected classrooms. Out front, employees in matching shirts hand out
brochures for part-time classes, or sell textbooks to the students who dart in
and out.
They’re
catering to young Cambodians looking for a step up in an emerging economy. For
years, learning English has been a prerequisite for many Cambodians wanting to
get ahead. But with China’s increasing clout and its conspicuous investment in
the region, speaking Chinese has also become a valuable skill.
The results
of China’s soft power efforts are up for debate. But here in Phnom Penh, many
young people are just as eager to learn about Chinese culture and language as
China is to export it. A local association of Chinese-Cambodians claims there
are some 30,000 full or part-time students now learning the language—many of
them in places like Jing Fa Chinese School, which offers basic Chinese lessons
at modest prices.
In a
ground-level classroom open to the street, students step around parked
motorbikes and find their seats. At the whiteboard in front, director Long
Sochea speaks slowly to the beginners’ class, raising his voice to be heard
over the din of the passing traffic.
When Sochea
started teaching Chinese in the 1990s, he only had a handful of students—mainly
Cambodians with Chinese roots trying to brush up on a distant ancestral tongue.
Now, he says, almost all his students are Khmer with no Chinese heritage.
Learning Mandarin, they hope, will give them an advantage in the business
world.
“Cambodian
families are encouraging their children to study Chinese,” he says, “because
they want their children to get jobs.” The school also offers basic lessons in
other languages, including English, Korean and Vietnamese. But when new
students ask him for advice, Sochea says he steers them in one direction.
“I tell them
to look at the investments other countries are making,” he says. “The real
money in Cambodia is coming mostly from China.”
China has become a
dominant investor here.
Since 2005, approved investments from Chinese companies in Cambodia have
exceeded $8 billion USD, according to the Cambodian Investment Board—far above
the sums expended by the next closest, Korea. But these figures offer just a
partial picture of Chinese ventures in Cambodia; they represent only projects
approved for tax exemptions and other incentives. They also don’t include
investors in the country’s special economic zones, or smaller projects approved
by provincial authorities.
These often murky investments have little
public transparency and, conveniently for the Cambodian government, lack the
demand for accountability and oversight associated with Western investments and
aid projects. Many of the rural Chinese investments are situated on
controversial government land concessions, which rights groups blame for
fueling a simmering land crisis that sees ordinary Cambodians losing land and
homes to powerful business interests.
In the city,
Chinese funding is earmarked for expansive urban developments and
infrastructure projects. In the countryside, Chinese firms are active in
large-scale hydropower, logging, steel, rubber and industrial-scale
agro-business. Chinese money is literally changing the shape of Cambodia’s
landscape.
For Chea
Munyrith, China’s prominence in today’s Cambodia stands in marked contrast with
his childhood growing up in the post-Khmer Rouge era of the 1980s. He remembers
his ethnic Chinese grandmother being too afraid to speak her Teochew dialect;
she didn’t bother to teach it to him.
“She told me
that we are Khmer, so we must speak Khmer now,” he says. “She didn’t want to
talk about being Chinese.”
As an adult,
however, Munyrith now finds Chinese integral to his career. He’s the
co-director of the country’s first Confucius Institute, the academies that have
been at the forefront of China’s global cultural push. Munyrith learned
Mandarin so he could communicate with his Chinese counterparts.
Since 2010,
the Confucius Institute here has been offering language lessons to Cambodian
public servants. The adult students include government bureaucrats, officers
and cabinet level officials.
“Today,
Chinese is not just the language of business,’ Munyrith says. ‘It’s the
language of politics.”
And when it
comes to politics, recent events have shown China and Cambodia are often
speaking the same language. China’s ongoing territorial disputes in the South
China Sea have caused friction within the region. As last year’s chair of the
regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Cambodia was accused
of siding with China ahead of its own neighbours when it came to discussions on
the maritime dispute.
Pavin
Chachavalpongpun, an associate professor at Kyoto University, says the trend
among ordinary Cambodians to learn Chinese is an acknowledgement of China’s
increasing prominence.
“This is
about accepting the Chinese leadership in the region,” says Pavin, who has
researched Chinese soft power. “When you study another country’s language, you
understand and you accept the leadership of that country.”
But as the
ASEAN controversy showed, the Chinese largesse in Cambodia does come with
implied obligations. For many starting to learn Chinese, however, it represents
an opportunity for a promising future. Back at Jing Fa Chinese School,
afternoon classes have wrapped up. Twenty-six-year-old Kaing Mengty is packing
up his books and getting ready to head back to his job selling Chinese-made
goods at a nearby market.
“I don’t
know much about China,” he says. “I just know my country. Cambodian people can
make money by trading with China.”
Irwin Loy (@illied) is a freelance journalist based in Phnom
Penh
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