Xuesong (Andy) Gao & Wei Ren. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Volume 22, Issue 3. 2019.

Introduction

This special issue intends to foster an academic dialogue among scholars who hold different views concerning efforts to promote and sustain bilingualism through education in mainland China. It covers bilingual education programs and practices among ethnic minority students, English-Chinese bilingual education initiatives, and efforts to preserve regional Chinese varieties (or dialects).

The 1.3 billion people in mainland China speak at least 2,000 more or less distinct dialects or subdialects of the Chinese language (Li 2006, 150), in addition to more than 290 languages of 55 ethnic minority groups including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang (Lewis 2009). It has been noted that ‘[l]anguage is a highly structured and sophisticated but flexible, subtle process’, which ‘can serve as a symbol of ethnic identity and cultural solidarity’ (Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor 1977, 307). Consequently, this linguistic diversity has historically been regarded as a significant challenge for language education policymaking by the Chinese government, which adopts a highly instrumental approach to language planning and sees a shared language as crucial for political unity. Since the Qin dynasty (BC 221-206; the first unified Chinese empire), successions of rulers have followed in the footsteps of the first emperor, who standardized the Chinese writing system to create a linguistic foundation for a unified China. Since the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949 the Chinese government has been promoting Putonghua (‘a common speech’) as the national standard spoken Chinese (Chen 1999), while ethnic minority languages have also been used in the schooling of ethnic minority students. The Law of the National Commonly Used Language and Script of the People’s Republic of China further stipulates that Putonghua should be used in public domains including government administration and education. By doing this, the national language policy effectively confines the use of other varieties of the Chinese language to private spaces (e.g. the home) and assigns them roles as carriers of ‘tradition’ and ‘cultural identity’ (Tan and Rubdy 2008, 11). Foreign languages, particularly English, have been regarded as critical in enabling the country to access technological know-how and capital since China reengaged with the world after the late 1970s. Bilingual education programs seem to have emerged from interaction between the Chinese government’s commitment to securing a shared linguistic foundation for a unified nation, its modernization aspirations, and individual desires to maintain linguistic diversity.

Three Types of Bilingual Education/Bilingualism in China

The tension surrounding the emergence and development of bilingual education programs in mainland China has attracted much research attention.¹ Over recent years the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism has published a series of studies on bilingual education of different sorts, including bilingual education for minority students (Zhou 2001; Feng and Sunuodula 2009; Tsung and Cruickshank 2009; Wang 2011; Ding and Yu 2013; Wang 2016; Rehamo and Harrell 2018) and English-Chinese bilingual education in mainland China (e.g. Tong and Shi 2012; Wang 2017; Xiong and Feng 2018). These studies have projected a contradictory picture of efforts to promote and sustain bilingualism and multilingualism through education in different parts of China at different historical times. For instance, Ding and Yu (2013) show how regional governments have been actively helping minority language students to maintain the Yi language through bilingual education (see also Rehamo and Harrell 2018), while Wang (2016) challenges regional governments about their efforts to reduce Uighur language instruction in Xinjiang’s schools. Tong and Shi (2012) highlight the positive impact of Chinese-English bilingual education on university students’ subject and language learning, but the provision of Chinese-English bilingual education has been problematized by scholars like Hu and Lei (2014) and also to some extent by Wang (2017). The identified contradictions in these studies need to be considered in the broader context of bilingual education in mainland China. Like Zhou (2001), who reviews how political and economic changes mediated bilingual education policy shifts during the 50 years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, we also believe that innovative practices and approaches (e.g. not equating bilingual education with biliteracy education) be adopted to promote and sustain bilingualism through education (e.g. Gao and Wang 2017). In the light of ongoing sociopolitical shifts in mainland China, this special issue brings together contributors who have different stances to explore three types of bilingual education initiatives and discuss their relevant complexities.

First, the bilingual education programs for ethnic minority students were part of a government-led educational campaign at the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, intended to provide education opportunities for ethnic minority groups (for a typology of bilingual education for Chinese minorities, see Dai and Cheng 2007). These programs aimed to develop ethnic minority students’ bilingual competence in the national standard Chinese language (i.e. in its spoken form as Putonghua and in its written form as Standard Written Chinese) and their own ethnic languages. By doing so, it was hoped that these ethnic minority students could be integrated into mainstream Chinese society and at the same time maintain their own cultural and linguistic integrity.

In spite of all the policy discourses, however, recent research has pointed out that bilingual education programs for ethnic minority students underscore an effort to assimilate these minority groups into mainstream Chinese society. While analyzing problems encountered by schools for ethnic minority students in implementing bilingual education programs, Lin (1997) identified that inequalities in political and economic development among different ethnic groups have led to the de facto marginalization of minority languages, even though relevant laws stipulated that minority languages have the same status as the Chinese language. As the Chinese language is promoted as the official language commonly used in public domains such as government and education, it is also associated with opportunities and social acceptance. In contrast, the space for using minority languages is much more limited despite their legal status. Without rewarding the use of minority languages with access to social mobility, minority languages lose their appeal for parents and local government officials (also see Xu 2018; Zhang and Pérez-Milans 2018). Any discussions of bilingual education for minority students in China need to address these contextual conditions before they develop responses.

Second, the rise of Chinese-English bilingual education occurred as a result of a growing dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of traditional English language teaching. A variety of initiatives have been undertaken to address this problem, including English immersion schools and the use of English as medium of instruction (MOI) in Chinese universities. Since the national standard Chinese is the MOI as prescribed by law, educational initiatives that use English as a MOI are called ‘bilingual education’ to stress the fact that the national standard Chinese is also used, so that they can gain acceptance from government at various levels. In 2001 the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued an official directive that mandates 5-10% of university courses should be offered in English. Although this directive is only related to Chinese universities, it has been widely seen as a policy that supports Chinese-English bilingual education or immersion programs in China’s primary and secondary schools (Yu 2008). Subsequently, these initiatives to integrate the learning of English into the learning of particular academic subjects, referred to as bilingual education, have been growing rapidly across China, and ‘bilingual education has become part of the everyday vocabulary … of educationists … [and] ordinary people’ (Feng 2005, 530).

Despite support from the MOE, Chinese-English bilingual education programs do not have legal status. The Language Law of the People’s Republic of China explicitly states that ‘schools and other institutions must use Putonghua and standardized Chinese characters as the basic spoken and written language in education and teaching’ (cited in He 2011, 98). In other words, the national language policy has effectively ‘ruled out the possibility of using English as the medium of instruction in schools as advocated by bilingual education’, and ‘bilingual education was not given any endorsement in the new secondary curriculum’ (He 2011, 99; also see Gao and Wang 2017). This means that Chinese-English bilingual education may be a temporary measure that the Chinese government takes to enhance its citizens’ linguistic capacity for the nation’s international engagement.

Third, the vitality of regional Chinese varieties or dialects in major coastal cities has also become a new but increasingly important public concern, which regional Chinese governments have felt obliged to address as China’s increasing globalization and the intensified nation-building process lead to outcries in the media about a ‘dialect crisis’ (Gao 2012, 2015; Shen 2016). This concern about a ‘dialect crisis’ may be seen as indicative of individual citizens’ voices being raised because of increasing individualization in Chinese society (Yan 2010). Individuals increasingly see regional Chinese varieties as part of their cultural or regional identities (e.g. Wee 2008). Also, these voices may be related to regional governments’ efforts to promote the cultural narratives of regions and raise their profiles as a result of political decentralization in the last decade (e.g. Li and Wu 2012). Regional governments have been using regional Chinese language varieties and cultures to promote public relations and attract investors and tourists. Therefore, regional Chinese language varieties are often associated with local cultural heritage, regional identities, commercial benefits and better publicity tools in the state print media (Gao 2015). There are also efforts to promote the use of regional Chinese varieties in kindergartens and primary schools, but such efforts have been received with skepticism by migrants who might feel linguistically disadvantaged in the process.

All the aforementioned efforts to promote and sustain bilingualism (e.g. through education) are to some extent double-edged and require critical examination. For this reason, this special issue invites scholars holding contrasting views on these bilingualism initiatives to advance their arguments with newly interpreted evidence. It must be noted that the researchers’ socio-political stances might have affected their interpretations of sociolinguistic and language policy issues. However, we believe that such dialogic exchanges may help readers better appreciate the complexity of the relevant topics. Given its unique structural organization, the special issue will showcase how different perspectives on the same topic may add to our appreciation of and engagement with critical issues such as bilingual education policies and practices in mainland China and beyond.

Summary of the Contributions

This special issue is a collection of studies on the three types of bilingual education initiatives in mainland China. Each initiative to promote and sustain bilingualism through education will be addressed by two papers with different or contrastive perspectives, to highlight the challenges of promoting and sustaining bilingualism through education in this linguistically and socio-politically complex context.

The first two papers focus on Tibetan bilingual education to illustrate the complexity of bilingual education for ethnic minority students in mainland China. In the first paper, J. Zhang contests that by treating different languages as separate entities and making a close connection between ethnic language and ethnic identity, researchers risk reducing sociolinguistic complexity into static and essentialized units. Approaching minority language education policy as a multilayered dynamic process, she reports on a case study of the implementation of Tibetan language education policies in a secondary school dominated by students who are officially categorized as Tibetan. Tibetans constitute the largest ethnic minority group in the city, and the Tibetan language is offered by the school as an extra academic subject. Her findings indicate that the Tibetan language education program examined may fall short of the goal of promoting Tibetan language and culture. Nevertheless, Tibetan language education provides added value for schools amid local academic competition, and offers students more chances for access to higher education. This study suggests the need to examine language education policies vis-à-vis situated institutional and inter-personal dynamics.

In contrast, in their study on family language policy research and its impact on bilingual education in schools within China, L. Zhang and Tsung identified serious conflicts between government language policies and family language practice since the government promotes the use of Chinese as the medium of instruction and the learning of Tibetan as a language subject in schools. Since language policy and planning (LPP) may entail diverse aims that reflect differing political, social, economic and linguistic needs, L. Zhang and Tsung explore the intersection of bilingual education policy in schools for Tibetan students and family language practices at home in Qinghai. The informants in the study expressed strong desires to preserve Tibetan culture and identity, although there is a lack of investment in developing Tibetan language learning resources. They also struggled to learn Chinese via the Tibetan language for further education and employment, because the Chinese language is a gatekeeper controlling access to education and employment opportunities (see also Xu 2018).

The next two papers center on the controversy surrounding using English as a medium of instruction in Chinese universities. English-medium instruction has been promoted in Chinese universities as a means to promote Chinese students’ learning of English and attract more international students to study in China. Hu and Duan question whether the use of English as a medium of instruction is an effective way to improve Chinese students’ subject and English learning, with a focus on teachers’ questioning and students’ responses. After analyzing classroom interactions in 20 lessons taught by Chinese lecturers in English, they found that both teacher questions and student responses were cognitively and linguistically simple. Though students in the soft disciplines (e.g. business, marketing) may produce syntactically more complex responses than their counterparts in the hard disciplines (e.g. engineering), these students are unlikely to improve their learning of English and subject content through classroom interactions. If lecturers are given no support to help them to change the ways they deliver lectures in the medium of English (e.g. scaffolding students’ learning effectively in the medium of English), English medium instruction courses may turn into another white elephant (e.g. Hu and Lei 2014).

However, Wang and Curdt-Christiansen offer quite a different picture on what can be achieved in an English medium instruction course at a Chinese university. They recognize the criticisms that have been leveled against the promotion of English as a medium of instruction in Chinese universities, and contend that translanguaging, a prominent phenomenon observed in English medium instruction classes, can be a solution to the problems identified by Hu and Duan. In their study Wang and Curdt-Christiansen found four types of translanguaging practices, including bilingual label quest, simultaneous code-mixing, cross-language recapping, and dual-language substantiation, all of which facilitate students’ learning of English and subject content. Consequently, they argue that English medium instruction courses in Chinese universities need to be reconceptualized towards flexible bilingualism to encourage the practices of translanguaging, in which students can draw on both Chinese and English as linguistic resources to facilitate their learning of subject content.

The final two articles engage with efforts to preserve regional Chinese varieties (or dialects of the Chinese language) in Shanghai. There have been heated discussions on the preservation of regional Chinese varieties in the mass media for many years (see Gao 2012, 2015, 2017). The decline of regional Chinese varieties such as Shanghai dialect and Cantonese has been related to the promotion of Putonghua and mass migration within mainland China (Gao 2015). Xia and Shen’s study on the preservation of Shanghai dialect in kindergartens reveals how different individual stakeholders such as teachers, researchers and policymakers exercise agency in initiating and mediating the development of pilot programs to preserve Shanghai dialect for implementation and delivery in Shanghai. These individuals have capitalized on the discourse of languages as resources to actively develop curricula for the promotion of Shanghai dialect, but they also need to pay more attention to other important areas such as providing personnel resources for the relevant programs, program delivery and material development. Xia and Shen celebrate the achievements of this bottom-up process where individual stakeholders play an important role, but they also note the limitations of such a process because national language policies are usually inviolable (Gao 2017; Shao and Gao 2017; Shen and Gao 2018).

In contrast to Xia and Shen’s enthusiasm for preserving Shanghai dialect, Shao and Gao critically interpret the print and social media coverage on the Shanghainese Heritage Project. They are particularly concerned that Shanghai dialect has been explicitly and implicitly perceived as a gatekeeper, a tool of othering, against migrants in Shanghai. Despite the official presentation of the Shanghainese Heritage Project as a means to reverse the decline of Shanghai dialect, the relevant media coverage unofficially constructs the issue underlying the project as the conflict between ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals’. In the process of promoting the use of Shanghai dialect, it is possible to make migrants, who do not speak Shanghai dialect but do make significant contributions to the development of Shanghai, feel ‘dis-citizened’. In other words, it is important for researchers and policy makers to question what constitutes the problem that demands a policy solution when exploring solutions to the decline of regional language varieties and promoting multi-dialectism (e.g. Shao 2016).

Having reached no consensus on what we need to do with regard to the promotion of bilingual education in mainland China in the above-mentioned papers, the special issue concludes with commentaries from two leading scholars of the Chinese ethnicity on language policy in China. Professor Ronghui Zhao from Shanghai International Studies offers her enthusiastic evaluation of the discursive space created by shifting ideological constructions of language in national policy documents, and argues that nuanced shifts in policy discourses create favorable conditions for innovative initiatives to preserve languages in mainland China. Professor Minglang Zhou from the University of Maryland draws attention to the dialectical relationship between language ideology as the superstructure and an institutionalized hierarchical order of languages as the base, which regulates individual language users’ access to resources, power and so on.

It is probably unrealistic for researchers to arrive at definite answers to the issues examined in this special issue, given the enormity of the task of promoting and sustaining bilingualism/multilingualism through education in mainland China. Nevertheless, we hope that we may help readers to achieve some shared understanding of the relevant issues, which may constitute a discursive space where scholars explore ways to preserve and sustain the vitality of minority and regional Chinese languages despite the restrictions imposed by the political establishment.