This text considers contemporary China’s language ideology and how it supports China as a rising global power player. It examines the materialization of this ideology as China’s language order unfolds on two front, promoting Putonghua domestically and globally, alongside its economic growth and military expansion. Within the conceptual framework of language ideology and language order and using PRC policy documents, education annals, and fieldwork, this book explores how China’s language ideology is related to its growing global power as well as its domestic and global outreaches. It also addresses how this ideology has been materialized as a language order in terms of institutional development and support, and what impact these choices are having on China and the world. Focusing on the relationship between language ideology and language order, the book highlights a closer and coherent linguistic association between China’s domestic drive and global outreach since the turn of the century.

This book explores language ideologies in China, which encounters the unprecedented global spread of English as a lingua franca, against the backdrop of globalisation where China emerges as a rapidly developing economy with vigorous promotion of Chinese around the world. The book addresses Chinese speakers' ideologies in relation to ELF and provides insights into non-native English speakers' engagement in the development of English in the future.

This book explores language ideologies in China, which encounters the unprecedented global spread of English as a lingua franca, against the backdrop of globalisation where China emerges as a rapidly developing economy with vigorous promotion of Chinese around the world. The book addresses Chinese speakers' ideologies in relation to ELF and provides insights into non-native English speakers' engagement in the development of English in the future.

This book is a critical study of the development of a racialised nationalism in China, exploring its unique characteristics and internal tensions, and connecting it to other forms of global racism. The growth of this discourse is contextualised within the party-state’s political agenda to seek legitimacy, in various groups’ efforts to carve their demands in a divided national community, and has directly affected identity politics across the global diasporic Chinese community. While there remains considerable debate in both academic literature and popular discussion about how the concept of ‘race’ is relevant to Chinese expressions of identity, Cheng makes a forceful case for the appropriateness of biological and familial narratives of descent for understanding Chinese nationalism today. Grounded in a strong conceptual framework and substantiated with rich materials, Discourses of Race and Rising China will be an important contribution to international studies of racism, and will appeal to academics and students of contemporary China, historians of modern China, and those who work in the fields of critical race, ethnicity, and cultural studies.

This book investigates the macroacquisition of Chinese – its large-scale acquisition and adoption for various purposes by individuals, governments and organisations – and the implications of this process for the future of English as a global language. The author contextualises the macroacquisition of Chinese within the global ecology of languages, then analyses the factors responsible for the macroacquisition of Chinese, showing, in contrast to most academic and popular commentary, that a character-based writing system will not stop Chinese from becoming a global language. He then articulates three possible future scenarios: English remaining a dominant global language, English and Chinese both being global languages, and Chinese becoming a global language instead of English. The book concludes by outlining directions for further research on the acquisition and use of Chinese around the world. It will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in English as a global language, Chinese as a second/foreign language, language education policy, and applied linguistics more generally.

Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages. It not only explores the standardization of national European languages, it also offers fresh insights on the standardization of minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages.

What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.