Conservative MPs have called on the Foreign Office to raise investment in Chinese language skills, as figures reveal a fall in the number of diplomats holding the department’s key qualification in Mandarin.
A Freedom of Information request by The Times showed that 44 British diplomats hold the “gold standard” certification, known as C1, down from 50 in the summer of 2016. The Foreign Office also admitted that during the past five years it had no record of any diplomats passing the exam in Cantonese, a main language of Hong Kong and Macau.
A global economic superpower, run by an increasingly assertive administration under President Xi, China has been rising up the British government’s agenda in recent years.
Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs select