A Matter of Balance — Reflections on China’s Language Policy in Education —

AbstractAlthough China has a clearly delineated policy on the dominant Han language and ethnic languages and has achieved successes in both status and corpus planning, there has never been a consistent well-designed plan for foreign language education. Policy shifts were often motivated by the political agenda at the time. My argument is that when the political agenda prevails over the educational, foreign language education suffers and that when the political agenda converges with the educational, foreign language education gains.In the early and mid-1950s because of China’s political alliance and economic construction Russian was promoted at the expense of English. Many Russian institutes and departments were set up and Russian soon became the preferred foreign language in the country. The Ministry of Education closed down most departments of English in normal universities and replaced English with Russian at secondary schools. This led to lop-sided development of FL education and a sharp decline of Eng...