As China's role in our economic and strategic future continues to grow, we badly need a deeper capacity to engage with it on a linguistic and cultural level playing field. We conspicuously lack that capacity, and the education policies that were intended to bridge the gap have made only small advances. It's time for a serious stocktake.

English is aggressively taught in China so that the country can engage with the outside world in both business and scholarship, but we are failing abysmally in this country to master Chinese. We are being left behind in the competition to understand and penetrate Chinese markets, Chinese culture and Chinese politics. This is lazy and even dangerous.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson Credit:Andrew Dyson

A joke went around some years ago to the effect that there were so many people in China learning English that there would soon be more English speakers in China than there then were in the United States; but that by the time this happened everyone in the United States would be speaking Spanish. We are fast approaching a situation here where only Australians of Chinese ethnicity will speak Chinese. This should alarm both economic and strategic planners.

It has been estimated that the current number of proficient adult speakers of Chinese in Australia of non-Chinese background is 130 at most; and half of those are already over 55 years of age. Obstacles and disincentives discourage non-Chinese students from taking up or persevering with Chinese as a second language; to the point where only 5 per cent of those who enroll in it at secondary school continue it to year 12. Last year, there were 400 year 12 students of Chinese as a second language – 20 per cent fewer than in 2008.