The Chinese Filipino Education System's Decades-Long Not Making Mandarin Accessible to Non-Chinese Speakers

 

Last updated: May 12, 2026

Yesterday, I wrote about traditional Chinese textbooks and why they can't be used in teaching Mandarin anymore. Today, I feel like writing about the root cause of the problem. There was a time when Chinese Filipinos never accepted that they were both Chinese and Filipino. Filipino citizenship while being ethnically Chinese. Right now, think that Bryan Loo may be of Chinese ethnicity, but his new brand, Tealive, is considered Malaysian by international standards. Jollibee's owner, Ton Tancaktiong, may be ethnically Chinese, but it's a Filipino firm. In the past, there have been some Chinese who were still reluctant to be called "Filipino". Maybe one can view the film Mano Po (the first film, anyway) and notice how some of the children wanted to "return to China". Maybe one can view The Joy Luck Club to try to understand the struggles of Chinese Americans in finding their identity.

The insular Chinese community of the Philippines and its effect on the Chinoy education system

The Chinese schools in the Philippines needed to be Filipinized for a good reason. A Chinese school in America needs to teach American English. A Chinese school in Malaysia needs to teach the Bahasa Malaysia language. A Chinese school in the Philippines has to teach Tagalog. Yet, some ethnic Chinese who are no longer considered Chinese by international standards refused to be referred to by their citizens. There was a time when some Chinese Filipinos refused to say they were Filipino and may have had a longing to go to China, even if they hardly spoke Mandarin. 

As a result, Chinese schools in the Philippines tend to teach Mandarin as a hermetic sacred language. If anybody has read about the late Bruce Lee's life story or watched Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story starring Jason Scott Lee (no relation to the late actor), one may notice that the Chinese Community in America was clannish. It's a direct observation, but several Chinese communities had the mentality of being sojourners. There was this mentality that "We are just going back to China someday." However, that dream kept dying because:

1. The Chinoy communities needed to naturalize to avoid deportation and to continue doing business. By then, every one of their descendants has become Filipino by birth. 
2. The Chinese communities are a minority wherever they are. As a Chinoy, that's a reality I accept. 
3. The rise of Communist China made that dream even harder.
4. By international standards, the descendants of the Chinese migrants are only Chinese by blood, but they can never be mainlanders. As a Chinese-Filipino, my official birth certificate will always have Filipino as my citizenship.
5. The next generation of Chinoys would be speaking more English and the local dialect to survive in business. Common sense dictates that no one can sell even a sack of rice to those they called "huan-a" (which used to mean barbarian) if they were speaking primarily in Lannang-ue or "our people's language".
6. The Chinoy-owned businesses that banned people from entering their businesses, saying, "If you can't speak our language, you should just drive a motorcycle doing menial jobs." would inevitably perish. Hokkien is a minority language in the Philippines. Some of these businesses either adapted (and that's how Jollibee was born) or perished (and elders probably are too embarassed to talk about htat someone they knew).

Bahay Tsinoy, museum of Chinese life in the Philippines

The result was the use of traditional Chinese textbooks (above). Chinese classes handled Chinese as a primary language rather than a secondary language. It required students to learn Chinese first when they should be entering Chinese classes to learn Chinese. I remember getting my hand spanked with a ruler whenever I failed to recite it properly. The Chinese teachers (and even the Chinese principal of any Chinese Filipino school) have very little choice but to follow the lousy curriculum. I thought it was just an isolated problem. Instead, I did some talks with some Chinese Filipinos, and the Chinese schools used more or less the same textbooks.

When we tried to Romanize on our own, we were told to stick to Zhuyin. Obviously, the wrong Romanization leads to the wrong pronunciation. It's like B is not P and D is not T. It requires discipline not to read Pinyin like it was English. Whether we want to admit it or not, the Filipinization of Chinese Filipino academies and sticking to traditional Chinese education is a bad mix. I remember complaining openly about what's the use of studying Chinese if I could never learn to speak it? I studied, and as long as I passed, that was it. Chinese language teachers had no choice but to let a student pass the written exam if they could write it down but not read it. There was too much focus on rote memorization. We need to memorize like I need to memorize the standardized Pinyin (and I used the Bopomofo sequence to memorize it), and I need to memorize the basic greetings and basic grammar. We need to memorize, but we also need to understand.

The end result is that when these people graduate in Chinese (maybe at least Grade 6, and take note that I never got my diploma because I failed in Zhuyin, and I'm fine with it, and I still get along fine with my former Chinese language teacher--they still can't speak Mandarin or write in Chinese. It was always the drill of any Chinese teacher to talk about the benefits and the importance. However, by teaching Chinese in that one-size-fits-all system, students without a Chinese background are bound to be overwhelmed. I always felt stupid whether I passed or I failed. It was even worse when previous-generation Chinese Filipinos complained about why their children can't be as "good as them". It's like a secretary from the 1950s complaining why her children can't use the typewriter as well as she does. Do they even realize that they can't register their businesses using Zhuyin? I wonder how many of the previous generation Chinese Filipinos can really speak English well enough to communicate in both languages for non-Chinese speakers?

It should be noted that some of the architects of Filipino protectionism are Chinese Filipinos. There were the late Manuel Lim and Alejandro Lichauco during the reign of the late Carlos P. Garcia. Garcia lost the re-election bid, but his Filipino First Policy still lived on. Ironic that several older generations of Chinese Filipinos didn't want to be identified with the "ethnic Filipinos" (who are Malay and Indo) while trying to build their empires in the Philippines. Those are the times when I feel ashamed of my own ethnicity. I even wonder if both Lim and Lichauco had their own interests? Lichauco even lied that Garcia's Filipino First Policy was effective. I believe the Filipino First Policy was also an enabler as to why Chinese Filipino schools got stuck in that kind of education system for decades. Yes, the price that the public pays for protectionist policies. As a result, the rich vs. poor gap increases, as well as the number of uneducated people. Even if all the poor unite to overthrow the rich, can they really do it without any basic literacy? 

South China Morning Post

The Bruce Lee method: Chinese Filipino Schools should teach Chinese as a secondary language for everyone

It's because when the literacy of American English and Tagalog increases, Mandarin Chinese is taught to people who can't even speak the language. It's like how the Chinoy schools should've shifted to Pinyin long ago. Mandarin isn't a subject that's meant to be in a hermetic chamber. If it were, would those Chinese Filipino schools explain how they intend to get people ready, as the number of Mandarin speakers worldwide is over a billion? That's why I even wrote an entry about making Mandarin Chinese more accessible and learnable in the Philippines. Just imagine that I only saw the beauty of Mandarin when I entered college. I did only share my regret but never started to question what really went wrong.

Bruce was antagonized by his peers in Chinatown. The rule was that "Never teach martial arts to outsiders." Yes, that was how Mandarin was back then. The Hokkien rule in class was the gatekeeper. My idea to teach Mandarin using English was often antagonized back in the day. People were saying I was just saying that because my grades in Chinese class were bad. I fell silent and just "swallowed my pride" (for now). But I had that deep simmering anger that couldn't get contained for long. Insult after insult was the "discipline". Bruce, however, did the opposite. He established the martial arts school anyway and taught non-Chinese. Lee went from traditional Kung Fu to Mixed Martial Arts, which would inspire combat like Kombatan and Yaw-Yan in the Philippines. Bruce taught the outsiders. True, Bruce died at only 32 years old, but his legacy continued to inspire people. The fact that Bruce married a Caucasian woman only fed my mind with, "Learning Mandarin should be for everyone, not just Lannangs. Otherwise, the Chinese school system will collapse faster." 

It's all about bridging the gaps. The use of bilingual Chinese textbooks will make it more practical to memorize increasingly difficult conversational questions and answers. Hopefully, the 华语 (huá yǔ) subject will focus on practical speaking. It would also mean having a Chinese-English dictionary as a requirement for the class. Having bilingual Mandarin textbooks would help people memorize certain material. It might be the standard question and answer. It might be filling in the blanks. This would require students to translate the question in Mandarin to English, answer in Mandarin, and translate the answer into English. During tests, they should also write down the Pinyin and English translation to see if they can translate back and forth.

After all, it was a relief when I heard from a Chinese teacher, "We're no longer using Hokkien in school." In short, the old-generation Chinese School Association tried to be like Bruce's peers. However, the use of dead reading methods couldn't create real Chinese literacy. People can keep chanting Mandarin phrases like robots, even graduate high school, but when asked some simple questions in Chinese, can they really answer it? Bruce may be gone from the world, but his lessons will continue to inspire. Bruce's martial arts school became successful because it chose to evolve. I can only imagine the dojos that made Chinese martial arts, only for Chinese, crumble into obscurity. We never hear their names in the movies or historians only have written negatively about that stagnant dojo. 

I really see the importance of 华语 (huá yǔ) more than ever. I want to stress that we need to make Chinese education more accessible. Also, it's time to make Chinese education focus more on learning than just simply grading. A good grade coming from learning something is a really good grade. A good grade that only came from rote memorization or cheating should never be considered a good grade.