Keywords

Introduction

Greater China geographically encompasses Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, but politically this map is the consequence of the cycle of globalization that brought the expansion of Western capitalism and colonialism into conflict with imperial China between the sixteenth century and the twentieth century. Taiwan was colonized by the Dutch and Spanish in the 1600s and ceded to Japan in 1895 before it finally returned to China in 1945. When China lost the Opium War in 1842, Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain and returned to China only in 1997. Macau was colonialized by the Portuguese in 1557 and its sovereignty was not undisputedly recovered by China until 1999. These losses created a humiliating sense of crisis among Chinese intellectuals who attempted in various ways to respond to that cycle of globalization.

When looking at the West, some Chinese intellectuals found then that modern nation-states appeared to be built on the ideology of one nation, one state, and one language. They followed this ideology to modernize China, blaming its linguistic diversity and “outdated” Chinese for its failure to meet the challenges of modernization (see DeFrancis 1972). Thus, the Qing dynasty (1616–1911) was urged to pass the Resolution on Methods of National Language Standardization (Tongyi guoyu banfa an) right before it collapsed in 1911. This language act set the precedent in language education policies for the infrastructure, teaching materials, teacher training, and codification of the national language in modern China.

China’s population has grown from 429 million in the early 1900s to over 1.3 billion in the early 2000s. Of this population, about 8% are ethnic minorities while over 90% are the majority Han. After a century of efforts at linguistic assimilation, over 130 languages are still spoken in China though some are endangered. These languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan, Altaic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Indo-European families (Sun et al. 2007). Meanwhile, in addition to its “outdated” script, the Chinese language has numerous dialects, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Hakka, which are not always mutually intelligible and thus also known as the Sinitic languages. Similar linguistic diversity is also found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Of the 23 million people in Taiwan today, about 98% are native speakers of various Chinese dialects, mostly Minnan or Taiwanese, while about 2% belong to Indigenous communities where 13 officially recognized Indigenous languages of the Austronesian family are spoken (Wu 2011). Hong Kong is primarily a Cantonese speaking community, of whose population of over seven million, about 90% are Cantonese speakers, 1% Putonghua speakers, 4% speakers of other Chinese dialects, 3.5% English speakers, and 1.5% speakers of other languages (Hong Kong 2011). Of Macau’s 552 thousand residents, about 83.3% usually speak Cantonese, 5% Putonghua, 3.7% Fujianese, and 2% other dialects, 0.7% Portuguese, 2.3% English, and 3% other languages (Macau 2012, 12–13). How to manage this linguistic diversity was and still remains a challenge in Greater China.

This chapter examines how the evolution of the Qing language acts in various forms responding to globalization and the needs of nation-state building in managing the linguistic diversity in Greater China since the early twentieth century.

Early Developments

Mainland

Viewing China’s extensive linguistic diversity as a problem in their modernization drive, the successive Chinese regimes followed the Qing’s 1911 approach to modernize Chinese for linguistic unification. The Republic of China (ROC) succeeded the Qing in 1912 and ruled the Mainland until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949. Soon after the founding of the ROC, Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), founder of the ruling Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD), envisioned modern China as a republic of five ethnic groups (wuzu gonghe), where the Hans, Manchus, Mongols, Huis (Turkic speakers), and Tibetans were equal citizens (see Zhao 2004). In Sun’s model of five- nation-state building, the ROC government took two separate approaches to language education. First, in the Han communities, the effort was to standardize the national language (Guoyu), reform the script, and vernacularize the written language (Chen 1999). Soon after the initial compromised settlement of Guoyu on the combination of both northern and southern Mandarin, the Ministry of Education (MOE) decreed that the first two grades of public primary schools should replace classical literary Chinese with vernacular literary Chinese in 1920 and other grades should gradually phase out classical literary Chinese. Correspondingly in-service training workshops for language teachers were held in Beijing and various provincial capitals while new Chinese primers were compiled to include diverse everyday Chinese, such as folksongs and newspaper articles, with a system of kana-like phonetic symbols to assist pronunciation and reading. Efforts were continued to finalize the standardization of Guoyu on the basis of the Beijing variety of Mandarin in 1926 and to introduce Guoyu Romanization as a step to modernize Chinese in 1928 (see Chen 1999), but efforts to simplify Chinese characters failed due to the resistance from the educated elite.

Secondly, the republican government based in Beijing established a Mongolian–Tibetan Affairs Office (Meng-zang yuan) to oversee education in minority communities in the 1910s–1920s. It funded minority language education and also encouraged Chinese language education. Since the late 1920s, the GMD-led central government in Nanjing adopted a minority policy that was more accommodating in north and northwestern China but more assimilating in south and southwestern China (see Mackerras 1994). For instance, a plan passed by the Second National Conference on Education in 1930 promoted, among a number of favorable measures, the development of bilingual textbooks and compilation of textbooks in minority languages in Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur communities (Inner Mongolia 1995, vol. 2), while Chinese language education was enforced in Miao and other minority communities in southwestern China.

The ROC’s assimilationist approach became intensified during the war against the Japanese invasion in the early 1940s when President Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975, in office 1928–1975) promoted a model of inclusive Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu). According to Chiang’s model, the inclusive Chinese nation evolved with various branches (zongzhi) being blended into one blood system (xuetong) in its long history, while by its virtue the Han civilization absorbed various minority civilizations to form an embracing Chinese civilization (Zhao 2004). In this model, language education policies became more assimilationist as an MOE decree indicates, “Frontier education should promote the integration of various ethnic groups” and “Frontier education should promote Guoyu education” (Song and Zhang 2005, p. 584). In preparation for a civil war against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, 1921-present) in 1945, the GMD appeared to be more willing to accommodate minorities linguistically. An MOE minority education measurement published in September of that year stressed that Guoyu education and minority language education may be both accommodated or one may be selected over the other depending on needs in minority communities (Song and Zhang 2005, p. 596). However, before the above policies could be effectively implemented, the GMD was defeated by the CCP and forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949.

In early 1949, the CCP was still considering available options of nation-state building before its outreach to the United States was rejected in the emerging Cold War. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in October 1949, the new Chinese government had already decided to take sides with the Soviet Union, and thus emulated the Soviet Union in many ways (see Bernstein and Li 2010). The PRC adopted the Soviet model of multinational-state building and adapted it to China by encoding it into the PRC’s provisional constitution (known as the Common Program or Gongtong Gangling) in 1949, the Guidelines for Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities in the PRC (zhonghua renmin gonghe guo minzu quyu zizhi shishi gangyao) in 1952, and finally the PRC Constitution in 1954 (Zhou 2003, pp. 42–45). Constitutionally this Soviet model entails the following doctrines: (1) all nationalities are equal, (2) all nationalities enjoy equal rights and obligations, (3) all nationalities have the right to use their native languages in official, public, educational, and private functions, and (4) minority nationalities have the right for regional autonomy to ensure their rights and interests.

Linguistically this Soviet model accommodates two separate tracks of national language developments, a main track for Chinese and a satellite track for minority languages. The main track is the development of the common language for the Han, which is known as Putonghua. Officially based on the phonology of Beijing Mandarin, northern Mandarin as the base dialect, and the grammatical norm of exemplary modern vernacular literary works, Putonghua did not have native speakers when its promotion began in late 1955. In November 1955, PRC’s MOE announced its decree that (1) all primary, secondary, and normal schools should use Putonghua as the medium of instruction (MOI) and require their students to speak Putonghua, (2) all provinces and municipalities should organize Putonghua training workshops and finish the training of language teachers by summer 1956 and other teachers by 1958, (3) local educational department and universities should collaborate in compiling Putonghua training materials and offering training classes, and (4) local governments and schools should organize Putonghua speech competitions and reward high-achievers (China 1996, pp. 48–55). Meanwhile, aiming at mass literacy, simplified Chinese characters and Romanization of Chinese (Pinyin) were also promoted along with Putonghua in all schools for a comprehensive modernization of Chinese. In a follow-up decree in February 1956, the State Council required that all students from third grade and up should be able to speak Putonghua by 1960, with the exception for minority communities where only Han students and students of Chinese should learn Putonghua (China 1996). It was expected that by the above measures Putonghua would first reduce the domains of dialect use and eventually replace various Chinese dialects to reach linguistic unification among the Hans, but this expectation was never materialized because of the PRC’s household registration system that blocked migration and thus the needs of Putonghua as a lingua franca.

The satellite track was destined to integrate with the main track in the theory of communism according to which all peoples would assimilate into one people speaking one language in a communist society (Zhou 2003). For minority communities, the Soviet linguistic model would first of all select a standard language which was expected to facilitate the development of diverse clan languages to fewer tribal languages and finally to a national language in preparation for the eventual national and linguistic integration. This process relies extensively on writing systems that ground on the standard pronunciation of a national language, share the same script with other national languages, and loan terms from the mainstream national language (Zhou 2003). Following this approach, the PRC created or reformed the writing systems for nearly twenty minority languages, aligning most of these systems with Pinyin for Chinese. The newly created writing systems were permanently or experimentally used for minority language education. However, minority language education in this track was always influenced by the CCP’s perception of the pace of China’s evolution into a communist society. The above multistep language policy was implemented when the evolution was perceived as slow, but a single-step policy to replace minority languages with Chinese was carried out when the evolution was considered imminent (Zhou 2003). Thus, the PRC’s language education policies for minorities were alternating between assimilation and accommodation in its first four decades (see Beckett and Postiglione 2010; Tsung 2009).

Taiwan

In August 1945 when the ROC recovered Taiwan from Japan, most people were able to speak Japanese because of a half-century’s forced Japanese language education in public schools, but they actually developed a Taiwanese identity instead of a Japanese identity and spoke their native languages privately (Wu 2011). After Taiwan’s return, the ROC’s language education policy unfolded in two major stages in decolonization (see Tse 2000).

The first stage is de-Japanization from 1945 to 1969. Adopting the ROC’s assimilationist language policy, the new GMD provincial government immediately launched its Guoyu Movement (Guoyu yundong) in Taiwan in order to (re)sinicize the local people, particularly in schools (see Tsao 1999). Soon tension between the local people and the GMD government led to riots and massacres in February 1947 when martial law was declared. Coupled with the retreat of the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949, this assimilationist policy was strengthened for the ROC’s inclusive Chinese nation-state building in Taiwan as the base for the imagined recovery of Mainland. Guoyu was designated as the only MOI in schools while all other languages were deemed inappropriate for educational function (Tsao 1999). According to the GMD government’s 1966 Reinforcing Guoyu Plan for Schools (Geji xuexiao jiaqiang tuixing guoyu jihua), children were punishable in schools when caught speaking their non-Mandarin mother tongues (Huang 2008). However, the sinicizing effort did not cultivate a solid Chinese identity in the local people, but stimulated the growth of the Taiwanese identity that began to challenge the GMD martial law in the late 1960s.

The second stage is the consolidation of Guoyu as the sole language in public domains between 1969 and 1986 when Taiwan’s economic success reinforced the ROC’s confidence in its authentic representation of the Chinese nation, such as the continued use of the traditional Chinese characters. In 1970, the MOE published Measures for the Implementation of Guoyu Movement (Jiaqiang tuixing guoyu yundong shishi banfa), which stressed the role of local Guoyu Promotion Councils and linked speaking standard Guoyu to model Chinese citizenship. In the following year, Taiwan’s provincial government made a specific plan to implement the MOE measures (Taiwan sheng jiaqiang tuixing guoyu shishi jihua), which covered Guoyu pedagogy, proficiency training and testing, and tutoring from primary schools to normal schools. To further Guoyu education, in 1973, a policy (Taiwan sheng ge xian shandi xiang guoyu tuixing banfa) was made to promote Guoyu, to wipe out the practice of speaking Japanese and native languages, and to strengthen local identification with the Chinese nation in Indigenous communities in rural Taiwan. More policies were made along the above lines with explicit references to identification with the Chinese nation and restoration of the Chinese culture during this stage, but this orientation evolved farther away from what the local people strove for (see Dreyer 2003; Huang 2000).

Hong Kong

Hong Kong residents used to strongly identify with China, though not necessarily with the PRC, because they were mainly political, economic, and war migrants from the Mainland (Bray and Koo 2005). They began to develop a strong Hong Kong identity since the 1970s when the colony’s economy rocketed. The British colonial government had English as the only official language from the 1840s to 1974 when Chinese was finally added as an official language. The new status of Chinese, which then referred to spoken Cantonese and written Modern Standard Chinese, did not have much impact on education until the last years of the colonial rule when schools began to be officially categorized as English-medium and Chinese-medium in preparation for the transfer of sovereignty to the PRC, creating a divisive problem across the transfer (see Tsui 2003).

Macau

During Portugal’s over four centuries’ of colonial rule, Portuguese was the sole official language until 1987 when Chinese was finally added as an official language in preparation for the transfer of sovereignty to the PRC. However, the Portuguese colonial regime’s language education policy was largely laissez-faire though Portuguese was required for a few public schools (see Bray and Koo 2005; Mann and Wong 1999). In the last decade of the colonial rule, six Portuguese-medium public schools served 5.1% of the students and six Luso-Chinese public schools taught 2.8% students. Chinese-medium private schools enrolled 86% students who were taught in spoken Cantonese and written Standard Modern Chinese, and English-medium private schools had 6.1% students (see Shan and Ieong 2008). Thus, Macau’s primary and secondary education was a triliterate (Portuguese, Chinese, and English) and quadrilingual (Portuguese, Putonghua, Cantonese, and English) world.

Current Developments

Mainland

The Soviet models were essentially bankrupted in China before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Economic and political reforms were initiated in the late 1970s to replace or remedy the Soviet models. Still the actual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 directly forced the CCP to search for options (see Shambaugh 2008). The CCP believed that the fundamental cause for the collapse lies in the problematic Soviet model of multinational state building that lacked direct central control of the republics and cultivated separatism. In the middle 1990s, the CCP leadership began to shift from the Stalinist discourse on the national question to a new discourse on an inclusive Chinese nation. The new discourse originated from Fei Xiaotong’s (1910–2005) Tanner Lecture delivered at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1988. Dr. Fei proposed the concept of zhonghua minzu duoyuan yiti geju, which he first translated as “plurality and unity in the configuration of the Chinese people” and later changed to “the pattern of diversity in unity of the Chinese nation” (Fei 1999). In Fei’s concept, the inclusive Chinese nation has evolved with the Han as the core but transcended the Han to embrace all the ethnic groups in China as diversity.

The CCP’s adoption of Fei’s concept has three direct policy impacts (Zhou 2010). First, it stressed speeding up economic development but downplaying the national question (jiakuai jingji fazhan, danhua minzu wenti), leading to China’s Great Western Development Project (1999–2009) to integrate minority communities’ economy with that of the Han heartland. Second, it revised the PRC Regional Autonomy Law in 1999 to curb local legislative power in order to preempt any possible legislative run-away. Third, it passed the PRC Common Language and Script Law in 2000, replacing the policy of two-tracks with a policy of a hierarchical language order where Putonghua functions as the super language while minority languages and Chinese dialects serve as complementary. These policy changes for greater economic, political, and linguistic integration lay the foundation for the Chinese model of an inclusive Chinese nation with diversity (zhonghua minzu duoyuan yiti).

The Chinese model as linguistically represented by the new language law has impacts on both Chinese and minority language education. In Han communities, the law has intensified Putonghua education at all levels of schools at a time when the demand for Putonghua use is increasing as the migrating Chinese population is skyrocketing to over 300 million throughout China annually. Chinese dialect communities felt the pressure on the maintenance of their mother tongues in schools and some began to take political action in the streets and local legislatures when the state started implementing its plan for a preliminary spread of Putonghua throughout China by 2010 and a comprehensive spread throughout the whole country by 2050 (Li 2005). For example, local legislature in some provinces and municipalities began to hear voices on the protection of Chinese dialects, such as Shanghainese and Cantonese, and there were peaceful demonstrations for the status of Cantonese in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in 2010. In minority communities, the law’s first impact was the dismantling of the infrastructure left by the Soviet model – separate minority-language-medium schools and Chinese-medium schools (minhan fenxiao). Local governments planned to integrate these two types of schools into a single Chinese-medium school system (minhan hexiao) between 2008 and 2015, but the plans are now slowing down because of the lack of qualified teachers and resistance from minority communities (Tsung 2009). For instance, in 2010, the Tibetan communities in Qinghai protested against the local government’s plan to switch from Tibetan as the primary MOI to Chinese in 5 years. The protest successfully pressured the government to slow down its pace in Qinghai and in other minority communities as well. The second impact is the development of bilingual preschools in minority communities where Chinese is not spoken. These preschools aim at a transitional bilingual education so that minority children can smoothly move up to compulsory education in Chinese (see Anaytulla 2008). This practice leads to a dilemma between minority parents’ concerns about the future of their children’s mother tongues and parents’ willingness for their children to learn Putonghua for social mobility.

Globally, the Chinese model also seeks to redefine China linguistically in the current cycle of globalization as China rises as a global economic powerhouse. In 2003 China launched its Mandarin initiative to promote Chinese globally (hanyu guoji tuiguang) (see Hartig 2012; Lo Bianco 2007). China’s global language education policy is one of its continuous responses to the West since the late 1800s and facilitates the globalization of Chinese that is characterized by (1) the shift to Putonghua in diaspora Chinese communities, (2) the adoption of Putonghua, Pinyin, and simplified characters as the standard in both public and private schools in the global community, and (3) the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes/Classrooms on every continent.

Taiwan

Monolingualism and multilingualism collided after the martial law was lifted in 1987 and democracy began to develop in the 1990s. Guoyu as the sole MOI in schools began to be challenged legally and politically since the Constitution of the ROC does not specify the status of Guoyu. The GMD led government headed by native leaders began to consider linguistic diversity. In 1993, the MOE announced that local languages could be offered as electives, effectively allowing additive bilingual education, though hours were still limited (see Wu 2011). Because of this change, MOE also encouraged the study and compilation of teaching materials for Indigenous languages. These measures were not enough as Taiwanese identity and other local identities arose rapidly. The politics on this issue became intensified after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) became the ruling party between 2000 and 2008. In 2003, the MOE published the draft of the Language Equality Law (guojia yuyan pingdeng fa), which proposed that languages of Taiwanese, Hakka, and Austronesian communities become national languages along with Mandarin (Wu 2011). However, it has not yet been passed by the legislature because it is considered a symbol of desinification. Meanwhile progress has been made in Indigenous language education. In 2006, the Council on Indigenous Affairs (Yuanzhu minzu weiyuanhui) of the ROC passed a 6-year plan to revitalize Indigenous languages. The plan includes (1) increasing legislative protection, (2) establishing promotional organizations, (3) compiling dictionaries and textbooks, (4) furthering linguistic research, (5) training workers for revitalization, (6) fostering Indigenous language use at home and in the community, (7) taking advantage of multimedia and digital technology, and (8) developing proficiency certification (see Zhou and Shi 2011). After the GMD returned to power in 2009, the ROC has continued the policy for diversity domestically while responding to the PRC’s Mandarin initiative with the establishment of Taiwan Academies (Taiwan shuyuan) to promote Guoyu and cultures of Taiwan globally (for more visit http://www.taiwanacademy.tw). However, the status of Guoyu in schools continues to be challenged as the politics of being Chinese or not still divides the communities in Taiwan.

Hong Kong

When the transfer was made within a frame of one country and two systems (capitalist and socialist) in 1997, linguistic sovereignty was an important dimension in the decolonization . The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) allows English to be used as an official language along with Chinese (Article 19) and HKSAR to formulate its language policy for education (Article 136). Now the ambiguity of Chinese has to be clarified since Chinese as the national language in the PRC refers to Putonghua while it conventionally means Cantonese in Hong Kong. To seek a balance, HKSAR developed a policy of biliteracy (written English and Modern Standard Chinese) and trilingualism (English, Cantonese, and Putonghua) in 1999 (Zhang and Yang 2004). However, the three spoken languages are associated with different identities and different functions. English represents an international identity and Cantonese stands for the local Hong Kong identity, while Putonghua clearly symbolizes a Chinese identity. Thus, English either as a subject or MOI still enjoys priority and prestige since Hong Kong needs it to maintain its global economic competitiveness and, possibly, its political ambivalence. Based on a proposal from the late colonial period, HKSAR published a mother-tongue teaching policy in 1998. The policy may be pedagogically and politically sound to the residents of Hong Kong since Chinese does not refer to Putonghua, but it is still considered secondary to English as the MOI (see Tsui 2003). Now Putonghua is awkward in that its political function is always obvious but its pragmatic function was less clear in the 1990s. The number of schools using Putonghua as the medium started low in the late 1990s but slowly increased in the early 2000s as China rose economically. In these schools students’ attitudes toward Putonghua have significantly improved by the end of the first decade of this century (Lai 2013). There were optimism and concerns about the momentum (see Bray and Koo 2005; Evans 2011). However, neither optimism nor concern is fully warranted if recent student protests are considered. Pragmatic considerations facilitate Putonghua education, but political concerns may undermine it and alienate young Hong Kong residents’ identification with the PRC. It all depends on how well the concept of one country and two systems works out for Hong Kong in the coming decades.

Macau

Modeled after that of Hong Kong, the Basic Law of Macao Special Administrative Region (MCSAR) allows the option of Portuguese to be used as an official language along with Chinese (Article 9) and gives MCSAR the authority to make policies on the MOI for schools (Article 121). The status for Portuguese may be offered to pacify the local residents and Portugal since Portuguese does not join the status that English has as the super language. Unlike Hong Kong, MCSAR never bothers to disambiguate “Chinese” for educational practice nor does it intend to change the practice of triliteracy and quadrilingualism in education. This practice has further extended to Macau’s flourishing higher education in the last two decades (see Bray and Kool, 2005; Shan and Ieong 2008). Only recently in its 2014 primary and secondary school curriculum does MCSAR regulate that Putonghua must be included in Chinese as the first language courses and may be included in Chinese as a second language courses, but it still does not directly interfere with the practice of Cantonese as the MOI (Macau 2014). Given this approach and the nature of Macau residents, Putonghua education both in regular schools and evening schools seems successful. Between 2001 and 2011, residents with the ability to speak Putonghua increased from 26.7% to 41.4% and English from 13.5% to 21.1%, while Cantonese reduced from 94.4% to 90.0% and Portuguese from 3.0% to 2.4% (Macau 2012, 13). Macau’s residents seem to be more willing to embrace their Chinese citizenship while going global. The momentum is expected to continue if the practice of one country and two systems is well maintained.

Problems, Difficulties, and Future Directions

Against the forces of the early cycle of globalization, efforts at the unification of Greater China have undergone four models of nation-state building, two during the ROC and two under the PRC, and three respective processes of decolonization in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau in the last hundred years. In these models and processes language education policies have been instrumental.

The current cycle of globalization continues to affect language education policies in Greater China because it changes both the global and local language orders (Zhou 2011). Globalization may bring Greater China together linguistically but might tear it apart politically. Putonghua is undoubtedly used in more and more domains and by more and more people because of the free movement of people, expansion of the market economy, and revolution in information technology in Greater China. Now Putonghua is seen as a threat to linguistic diversity, both in Chinese dialect communities and minority language communities. Protests of Putonghua-dominated language education policies have arisen now and then, as witnessed in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Qinghai as recently as 2010. Thus, how the state keeps a good balance between monolingualism and multilingualism in education remains a great challenge for the twenty-first century.

Globalization offers both opportunities and challenges, the successful handling of which depends on the wisdom of various stakeholders. Economic globalization actually facilitates linguistic unification as Chinese emerges as a global language. With this free ride, inclusive Chinese nation-state building should embrace linguistic diversity, not taking advantage to eliminate it. Linguistically an inclusive Chinese nation may be built only on consensus and enjoyable and empowering language education experiences. How the desired consensus and experiences will be worked out remains a challenge in the next few decades.

Cross-References

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