MCLC: protecting Chinese from English

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: protecting Chinese from English
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Source: Bloomberg Businessweek (5/22/14):
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/china-moves-to-protect-its-
language-from-english

China's War on English
By Dexter Roberts

Chinese authorities are waging a war on American culture and the use of
English. In April, China’s media regulators yanked the popular U.S.
television shows The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, and The Good Wifefrom Chinese
streaming websites Sohu(SOHU) and Youku (YOKU). The official party
newspaper, People’s Daily, ran two editorials in April bemoaning the use
of words borrowed from English when speaking Chinese. Then in mid-May came
a flurry of reports in the state media confirming plans announced last
fall to reduce the importance of English-language instruction and to
expand courses on traditional culture in grade school and high school.

The government “wants to make us respect the Chinese language and culture
more,” says Guo Jintong, a 16-year-old Beijing high school student, as he
sits in a Starbucks drinking a grande cappuccino. “With everyone wanting
to go overseas to study, there is a craze for English and the West that
you can say has become excessive. This could have a bad effect on China.”
Guo says he plans to go to the U.S. for graduate school after getting his
bachelor’s in physics in China.

China’s obsession with English dates to the establishment of
foreign-language schools and translation centers—mainly for English—along
China’s coast after the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, says Yang Rui,
director of the Comparative Education Research Center at the University of
Hong Kong. And while Russian was the official second language during the
1950s, English again took primacy when Deng Xiaoping launched economic
reforms in 1978 and China was eager for technology and investment from the
West. (Yang learned English by secretly listening to banned Voice of
America broadcasts during the Cultural Revolution, when speaking a foreign
tongue could land you in jail.)

Urban children usually begin studying English in the third grade, and it
is one of three core subjects throughout elementary and high school, along
with math and Chinese. Regardless of what field one chooses, passing an
English proficiency test is required to get into university and graduate
school. Academics who want to be promoted to a full professorship have to
pass English examinations. Language training schools including New
Oriental and Global Yasi School have opened branches across the country to
meet the demand. “English has become more important not only in schools
but in society as well,” says Wang Xiaoyang, product director of the
Higher Education Research Institute at Tsinghua University. “Now it looks
like China’s English fever has reached a high point.”

Why clamp down now? China by one measure—purchasing power parity—could
become the world’s largest economy this year. It’s increasingly asserting
itself overseas. Studying Chinese is growing in popularity in schools
across the U.S., and China’s education authorities are pushing Chinese
language and culture globally, in part through the opening of Confucius
Institutes.

Top leader Xi Jinping has popularized the idea of a “Chinese Dream” aimed
at providing an alternate source of aspiration for the nation’s youth now
seen as blindly pursuing Western values and pleasures. “China has
developed and become more confident about its own identity, and we think
we can and need to say no to certain things; that, unfortunately, includes
Western culture and English language,” says University of Hong Kong’s
Yang. Zhan Haite, the 16-year-old daughter of migrant workers in Shanghai,
says, “They are doing this because they want to show the world I’m proud
that I’m Chinese. But they also want to close the door for Chinese
students so they can’t see or know so much about the world.”

The authorities fear the Chinese are losing mastery over their written
language. With smartphones, tablets, and computers equipped with character
recognition software, Chinese have less need to remember the strokes for
the 3,500 to 4,000 characters the average high school graduate is expected
to know.

A survey last year by Beijing-based Horizon Research Consultancy Group
found that 94.1 percent of Chinese occasionally had trouble remembering
characters, while 26.8 percent said the problem occurred frequently.
Television shows such as Hero of Hanzi (hanzi means Chinese character),
where contestants compete to write characters—the equivalent of a spelling
bee—have become national hits. The worries are starting to increase
business at private Chinese-language tutoring schools that introduce
children to classic literature such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The
shift in emphasis away from English and toward Chinese will “drive demand
for programs where children can learn more about traditional culture,”
says Wang Naizhong, director at Dongxuetang, a private school in Beijing
that teaches children their characters and Chinese traditions.