Why China is turning away from English
President Xi Jinping wants his country to show more “cultural confidence”
WHEN CHINA made English a compulsory primary-school subject in 2001, the same year it joined the World Trade Organisation, it was taken as a sign that the once-insular country was opening up. The education ministry said the new language requirement was part of a national strategy to “face modernisation, face the world and face the future”.
Two decades on, amid a surge of nationalism, English seems to be falling out of favour. Metro-riders in Beijing, the capital, will notice that the language has been removed from some station placards and maps (often replaced with pinyin, the romanised form of Mandarin). Some smaller cities, such as Taiyuan and Shenyang, are making similar changes. The province of Hainan has launched a campaign to “clean up and rectify” kindergarten names by purging a variety of words, including “world”, “global”, “bilingual” and “international”.
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Lingua no thank ya"
From the April 16th 2022 edition
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