Abstract
This chapter examines how a resurgence of nationalism in the People’s Republic of China under President ** has affected the teaching of English there. First, the authors provide a brief history of English in China, and then focus on its role in the internationalization of Chinese universities in the 1990s and early 2000s. Next, they examine recent changes to national and local English teaching policies through the perspectives of instructors and students at a coastal university in southern China that was part of the economic opening and reforms in the 1980s but has since shifted its orientation away from internationalization under pressure from the central government. By recounting of these experiences, the authors reveal the range of impacts that recent nationalist policies have had on English teaching in China and point to pedagogical interventions that seek to balance internationalist and nationalist desires in China.
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Notes
- 1.
While the term “sick man of Asia” was coined by a Chinese national, it is important to note that it is also regarded as derogatory by many Chinese today and was, in fact, the source of a recent controversy surrounding an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Walter Russel Mead titled “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” which criticized the central government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak in 2019. As a result, three foreign journalists were expelled from the country (“China Expels Three”).
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McPherron, P., McIntosh, K. (2020). From “Sick Man” to Strong Man: The Changing Role of English Language Teaching in China in an Era of Rising Nationalism and Global Ambitions. In: McIntosh, K. (eds) Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching in the Neo-Nationalist Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56550-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56550-3_9
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