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So they say, but I wouldn't count on it.  We've heard this patriotic, isolationist tune sung countless times during the last thirty years or so (in fact, it happens every time preceding a national political meeting, but nothing ever comes of it).  The wealthy, privileged, elite, right up to and including Chairman Xi, keep spending a fortune to send their children to the comfort, safety, and English environment of the USA.  I know, because I've taught hundreds of them during the last twenty years and more.

"‘Reversing Gears’: China Increasingly Rejects English, and the World:

A movement against Western influence threatens to close off a nation that succeeded in part by welcoming new ideas."  By Li Yuan, NYT (9/9/21)

Selected passages from the article:

…

It’s hard to exaggerate the role English has played in changing China’s social, cultural, economic and political landscape. English is almost synonymous with China’s reform and opening-up policies, which transformed an impoverished and hermetic nation into the world’s second-biggest economy. That’s why it came as a shock to many when the education authorities in Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city
in the country, last month forbade local elementary schools to hold final exams on the English language.

…

Many call the phenomenon “reversing gears,” or China’s Great Leap Backward, an allusion to the disastrous industrialization campaign of the late 1950s, which resulted in the worst man-made famine in human history.

Last year, China’s education authority barred primary and junior high schools from using overseas textbooks. A government adviser recommended this year that the country’s annual college entrance examination stop testing English. New restrictions this summer on for-profit, after-school tutoring chains affected companies that have taught English for years.

…

The Communist Party is intensifying ideological control and nationalistic propaganda, an effort that could turn the clock back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was closed off to much of the world and political campaigns overrode economic growth. A nationalistic essay widely spread last week by Chinese official media cited “the barbaric and ferocious attacks that the U.S. has started to launch against China.”

Even just a few years ago, the Chinese government still emphasized learning a foreign language. “China’s foreign language education can’t be weakened. Instead, it should be strengthened,” wrote the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, in 2019. The article said nearly 200 million Chinese students took foreign language classes in 2018, from elementary schools all the way to universities. The vast majority of them were learning English

…

As the internet developed, a generation of Chinese learned English from TV series like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

Some business people struck gold by teaching English or offering instruction on how to take tests in the language. New Oriental Education and Technology, a company based in Beijing, became such a cultural phenomenon that it inspired a blockbuster film, “American Dreams in China.” The hero taught English the way many in China learned it, such as memorizing the word “ambulance” as the Chinese for “I can’t die.” (“Au bu neng si.”)

Twenty years ago, an article like this would have mentioned Crazy English and Chinglish, but China's English has progressed far beyond those bastardized forms of the treasured language.  Now my M.A. students from China have excellent English skills, so good that many of them leave me gaping with amazement at their natural fluency and rich vocabulary.

 

Selected readings

• "It is cool to f*** the empress" (11/26/20)
• "You can you up" (5/12/14)
• "Chinglish in English?" (5/8/14)
• "English in China" (10/25/06)
• "English in China #2" (3/16/13)
• "China jettisons English" (9/12/21)
• "English tips from Li Yang, noted wife-beater and pedagogue" (10/23/13)
• "Chinese Endangered by English?" (3/15/10)
• "A Ban on Roman Letter Acronyms?" (4/21/10)
• "English Banned in Chinese Writing" (12/23/10)
• "English as a prestige language in Taiwan" (11/29/20)
• "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18)
• "The further elaboration of a flagrant mistranslation" (8/31/13)
• "The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation" (12/9/07)
• "Braised enterovirus, anyone?" (7/16/08) — with numerous examples and references to the mistranslation of 干

These are just a small sampling of relevant posts on English in the Sinitic world.

[Thanks to Pranav Mulgund]

September 12, 2021 @ 10:13 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Language teaching and learning

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