Bilingual Education in China

The concept and institutional practice of bilingual education in China must be considered in terms of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) two models of nation-state building: the Soviet model of multinational state, and the Chinese model of one nation with diversity (zhuanghua minzu duoyuan yiti). The PRC's idea of nation-state building has been evolving around these two models since 1949. Bilingual education is a key component of these models and serves the ultimate goals of nation-state building.

China is a multilingual country where more than 130 languages are spoken by various ethnic/national groups. When it adopted the Soviet model in 1949, the PRC formed a central government with directly ruled and autonomous local governments, constitutionally recognizing the equality of all nationalities, granting regional autonomy to the officially identified 55 minority nationalities, and guaranteeing these groups the freedom to use and develop their native languages and writing systems. With the ultimate goal of integrating all nationalities into one single people in communism, this model envisioned a linguistic satellite relationship where each minority language had its own sphere of functions while all were drawn to the major language—Mandarin Chinese. Thus, it allowed two tracks of language development and use during a gradual transition. First, in the mid-1950s, China began to promote Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua as the standard for the Han majority and to romanize Chinese characters as Pinyin. Second, at the same time, it created new writing systems and reformed existing ones for standardized minority [Page 217]languages, following the pattern of Pinyin. For the transition, the Han majority and national minorities were to learn each other's languages, while eventually all minority languages would be pronounced and written like Mandarin Chinese because of the extensive use of Mandarin Chinese words and Pinyin spelling. In the above process, the PRC recognized 7 writing systems for minority languages as official and 19 as experimental for full or partial use in bilingual education.

Within this model, bilingual education was understood as two types of second language (SL) education: Chinese taught as SL to minorities, and minority languages taught as SL to Han Chinese. These two types of instruction were first implemented in training academies for minority officials to learn Mandarin Chinese, and for Han officials to learn minority languages in the 1950s. The former type, Mandarin Chinese as SL, was gradually implemented in colleges, secondary schools, and higher levels of elementary schools from the 1950s to the 1960s. However, bilingual education so conceived did not include the conceptualization of Chinese or minority languages as the medium of instruction but considered them only as the target languages. Since the late 1950s, as China began to take a “shortcut” to communism, Chinese education replaced native language education in many minority communities. This sudden shift created an unofficial but accepted practice of using local minority languages as a supplementary medium of instruction, along with Chinese, for many courses in elementary and secondary schools since most of their students understood little Chinese.

This situation changed after China started its economic reform in the late 1970s. New practices and concepts emerged to challenge the idea of bilingual education simply as SL education when minority communities attempted to revive their native language use in schools. Their efforts first followed the tradition of adding their languages to local school curricula as a subject, but some communities realized that for their languages to maintain and develop they should take a step further. While waiting for official funding to publish subject textbooks in their languages, they explored teaching math, science, and other subjects in their native language with the textbooks written in Chinese, leading to a dual-media bilingual education where the oral and written media of instruction were separate. As subject textbooks in minority languages were published, some elementary and secondary schools offered parallel bilingual education—some courses in Mandarin Chinese and some in minority languages—which had been actually practiced in universities in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Yanbian since the 1950s. In short, bilingual education in China included SL education—the supplementary, the dual-media, and the parallel—by the early 1990s.

...