For more finance executives, working in China means taking up Mandarin
- From: rst0wxyz <rst0wxyz@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:25:53 -0700
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/bloomberg/sxb4.php
By Le-Min Lim Bloomberg NewsPublished: August 23, 2007
HONG KONG: At 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, Michael Image, a currency expert,
sits in a small room near Hong Kong's bustling bar district, gnawing
on a pen and discussing financial terms - in Chinese.
"Say 'tongji,' " chimes his language teacher, Elena Jiang, crisply
pronouncing the term for "statistics" as she draws two characters on
the white board: one shaped like a winged pagoda atop a tree, the
other an embellished Christian cross.
"Tongji," Image repeats, inadvertently altering the tones to mean
"fugitive" and drawing a correction from Jiang.
The parry-and-blow is part of an hour-long class that Image, who is
30, has been taking every week since 2004, six months after Standard
Chartered transferred him to Hong Kong to advise clients on ways to
reduce their foreign-exchange risk.
In China, the era when executives from overseas could rely on
translators is ending. Authorities now require top executives at
securities firms to pass written and oral exams in Mandarin, the
national tongue, and Chinese managers expect meetings to be conducted
in their own language.
"An executive can probably get by without speaking Mandarin, but the
one who does will have a much better chance of succeeding," says Helen
Cheung, a director at Executive Mandarin, the language school where
Image studies. "It makes you seem more intelligent, more involved than
the foreigner who just sits there and smiles."
Goldman Sachs Group is learning that lesson. The firm's plan to
appoint Richard Ong, a Malaysian-born Chinese, to head its venture in
China was derailed by concerns that he would not be able to pass the
test, required of all "senior managers, directors and supervisors"
since November. Instead, Goldman promoted Zha Xiangyang, who was born
in China, in May.
Edward Naylor, a Goldman spokesman, declined to comment on how the
bank is responding to the test. Ong, who holds an MBA from the
University of Chicago, also declined to comment, Naylor said.
"If the boss of a securities company in China doesn't know the
language, how could we expect him to communicate effectively with the
staff, the government and investors?" said Xu Weijuan, who heads the
department that preps bankers for the test at the Securities
Association of China. "He wouldn't even understand the notices we post
on policy changes."
Goldman and UBS are the only global investment banks that have
management control of ventures allowed to underwrite share sales in
China and are thus most affected by the exam requirement. After a
fivefold rise in China's benchmark stock index over the past two
years, firms including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are seeking to
create similar ventures.
Philip Partnow, a managing director at the UBS venture in Beijing, is
the only Western banker who has passed. He declined to comment for
this story.
Most overseas managers are learning Chinese voluntarily.
Image, who studied psychology at Oxford University and heads Standard
Chartered's currency-product team, says his language skills helped him
break the ice at a recent meeting where Chinese executives spoke to
each other in their own language. When Image introduced himself in
Mandarin, they were stunned.
"Just knowing what's going on during meetings, being able to nod at
the right time and interject makes a big difference," Image says.
"They're more open and willing to deal with me."
At Executive Mandarin, the number of investment bankers studying
Chinese has risen 30 percent in the past year, Cheung said.
Chinese is one of the toughest languages to learn, said Qing Zhang, a
professor of linguistics at the University of Texas. First, the
meaning of each sound changes depending on tone. The four tones
applied to the sound "yi" change the meaning to "one," "aunt," "chair"
and "100 million."
Worse, students must memorize thousands of picture-like characters,
instead of the 26 letters that make up English words.
For instance, the character for "moon" resembles a crescent, that for
"man" looks like a figure on two legs, and "follow" stacks one "man"
on the back of another. The simplest Chinese word is the character for
"one" which is a single horizontal line, the most complex requires 56
strokes.
"The toughest part is retaining the vocabulary," says Image. "The
characters don't look like anything in European languages."
Cheung of Executive Mandarin estimates a nonnative would have to study
Mandarin full time for five years to pass the securities exam. Since
the test began in 2005, fewer than 10 foreigners have passed,
according to a list of successful candidates posted on the Securities
Association's Web site.
China's approach is unusual. Neither Japan nor Hong Kong test top
managers at securities firms. In both places, specialists like
analysts and fund salesmen must pass job-specific tests that can be
taken in English.
1 | 2 Next Page
.
- Prev by Date: US commander says Asian war games not aimed at China
- Next by Date: Beijing blasts U.S. for tainted soybeans
- Previous by thread: US commander says Asian war games not aimed at China
- Next by thread: Beijing blasts U.S. for tainted soybeans
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
