Mandarin Chinese in the Philippines

[4] Efforts in the 21st century to promote Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese Filipino institutions and recent utilitarian trends, such as more Mandarin job opportunities, recent immigrants from China or Taiwan, summer education trips to China or Taiwan, encouragement of universities and schools by past presidents, and education exchange deals with China have spurred interest and potential for growth in the usage of Mandarin.

Historically, the first and oldest Chinese school in the Philippines, the Anglo-Chinese School「小呂宋華僑中西學堂」(modern-day Tiong Se Academy), was founded on April 15, 1899 by Engracio Palanca Tan Kang,[4] the son of Carlos Palanca Tan Quien Sien, the Gobernadorcillo de los Sangleyes or Capitan chino of Binondo (Manila Chinatown) and the first acting consul general of Qing China to the Philippines,[10] just after the end of the Spanish colonial era and the early months of the Philippine-American War during the start of the American colonial era.

'national language', which its status continued even after the fall of the Qing dynasty, only decades later gradually switching to the modern Beijing-based Mandarin.

During the early 20th century American colonial era in the Philippines, newly founded Chinese schools gradually adopted the modern curriculum from China, which included Chinese language, history, geography, math, and sciences, which the language of instruction shifted from monolingual Hokkien to bilingual Hokkien and Mandarin instruction, where initially the Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese teacher would primarily read and explain Chinese texts in Hokkien, whilst simultaneously teaching how it is read in Mandarin for the average Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese student back then, since Mandarin was the official "national language" of ROC, often translated as "Chinese language" from an outside-China perspective.

The system had issues with duplicated subjects such as mathematics and science which were taught once in English and also another time in the Chinese curriculum.

Manuel Quezon on December 31, 1937 as the basis of the National Language (Tagalog: Wikang Pambansâ) of the Philippines.

During this time, Chinese language, literature, and mathematics, were mainly taught via rote memorization, known in Philippine Hokkien Chinese: 死讀; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: sí-tha̍k, where teachers pointed to a picture of an object or animal, then recited the Mandarin vocabulary words together side-by-side their equivalent Hokkien words in Chinese language class, which students were expected to repeatedly recite and orally memorize (e.g. teacher points to a fly, students recite: 苍蝇; tsʻang1-ying2; ㄘㄤ ㄧㄥˊ, 胡蠅; hô͘-sîn; teacher points to a mosquito, students recite: 蚊子; wên2-tzŭ5; ㄨㄣˊ ˙ㄗ; 蠓; báng), then for Chinese mathematics class, the multiplication tables were mainly memorized in Hokkien (e.g. "2 × 1 = 2, 2 × 2 = 4, 2 × 3 = 6" are read in Philippine Hokkien Chinese: 二 × 一 = 二，二 × 二 = 四，二 × 三 = 六; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: lī-it lī, lī-lī sì, lī-saⁿ la̍k).

This made it so Chinese schools in the Philippines from then on were officially under the purview of the Republic of China (ROC) and Chinese schools and teachers had to register with the ROC embassy in the Philippines back then for supervision of the Chinese departments of each school and for teachers to get a certificate to teach, while the other subject departments were registered and supervised by the Philippine government's Department of Education (DepEd).

In 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the ROC government under the Kuomintang (KMT) and its remaining armed forces and refugees retreated to Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War.

The martial law era of Taiwan saw the promotion of Mandarin with a monolingual Mandarin language policy as part of the KMT's consolidation of power in Taiwan via de-Japanization and promotion of national unity against its ideological rival in mainland China.

The ROC government encouraged Mandarin as a national language that would serve as a lingua franca for all groups in Taiwan and heavily discouraged any other with harsh policies, for its ambition of national unity and patriotism through standardizing Mandarin as a means to prove that the newly established Republic of China in Taiwan is more superior and united than the People’s Republic of China.

[11] Likewise, after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) across the late 20th century, it also made efforts in mainland China to promote Mandarin as Standard Chinese under the State Language Commission established in 1949 to facilitate easier communication throughout the country using Mandarin as a national lingua franca.

The Hanyu Pinyin romanization system for Mandarin Standard Chinese was also first introduced and taught in 1958 in mainland China, then adopted in 1980 in Singapore, and in 2009 in Taiwan.

Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared Martial law in the Philippines and later promulgated the 1973 constitution, which banned the ownership and operation of alien schools, which were to be phased out in 4 years.

There were also some Chinese schools and especially the ROC embassy that resisted the nationalization, citing their service in education, provision of local employment, their high English education standards, and the 1947 Sino-Philippine Treaty of Amity, which increasingly became no longer applicable as the Chinese school owners now mostly received Philippine citizenship after the mass naturalization of 1974.

In some cases, there were still a few that maintained the dual curriculum set up where afternoons were devoted entirely for Chinese classes, though not as lengthily anymore compared to pre-nationalization years.

The immediate solution mainly pursued to mitigate the problem in past decades of the late 20th to 21st century was to import teachers from abroad initially from Taiwan, then also mainland China as of 2003.

It proved only to be a band aid solution as the problem encountered there though during the 1990s-2000s was that the foreign Chinese teachers usually could not communicate well, due to their own lack of English and Tagalog fluency, and usually fail to understand the local culture and behavior of Chinese Filipino students to properly teach and appropriately grade them.

In recent decades around the late 20th century to early 2000s depending on the school, many schools started to shift to using simplified Chinese characters and the Pinyin phonetic system instead ever since the Philippine government recognition of the PRC and the introduction of books and teaching materials from mainland China and sometimes Singapore started to be used and taught.