China’s two-fold linguistic policy: English today, Chinese tomorrow?
USUI Hiroyuki（El Popola Ĉinio [China Report]）
This presentation will first tell you the obvious. As their counterparts in other
non-English-speaking countries the Chinese government is trying to increase the
number of English-only programs in higher education. This policy is understandable
as the country hopes to host 500 000 international students by 2020 according to its
“Study in China Plan”.
Superficially this situation is similar to that of Japan. The goal of the Japanese
government, for example, is to attract 300 000 international students by 2020 and for
this purpose a number of Japanese universities are going to expand their programs
taught exclusively in English. But it is the contention of this presentation that the
scales of such a huge country like China and such “tiny” countries like Japan or
Germany must be intrinsically different.
This presentation wants to eventually argue that the attitude of China is actually
two-fold – i.e. while the country, on one hand, is pragmatically reacting to the current
trend of globalization/Englishization including that of higher education, on the other
hand it is preparing its major “linguistic offensive” on the global scale to replace
English by Chinese as an international language. The language choice in higher
education will not foretell but only follow the result of this “linguistic battle”.