The assignment of language value is at the core of the language policy formu-lation in China. Part of this occurs explicitly and part of this occurs implicitly.
The overt motivations are nation building, modernization and the social and cultural development of all ethnic groups in the country while the less salient motivations include understandably the twin desires for political stability and international stature.
Soon after the PRC was established in 1949, China embarked on a literacy campaign; the rationale provided then, in publicity and in reality, was the need to unify and modernize the nation. For the Han Chinese, the strategy was to standardize and propagate a national dialect, Putonghua, and a simpli-fied script. For the minorities, to uphold a classless ideology (overtly) and to enhance political harmony (covertly), the PRC also found it necessary to
respect the language and cultural rights of the minority groups in China.
A major initiative to describe the minority languages was thus begun in the 1950s. In addition to the codification work on domestic languages, because China’s initial strategy was to align with the Soviet Union, Russian was pro-moted as a foreign language. When relations with the Soviet Union did not develop as desired, from the late 1950s, China replaced the teaching of Russian with the teaching of English. All education work, however, was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which formal education suffered a severe setback. University admissions resumed in 1978 and work on all three language policies began anew (Lam 2005: 8–10). In 1991, the disintegration of the Soviet Union provided the political space for China to navigate her way into the international arena through initiatives such as joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 and hosting the Olympics in 2008. This interna-tional orientation makes it necessary for China to include in her agenda the objective to prepare her citizens to communicate with the world, as mentioned in the latest 2003 English syllabus for the schools (Wang and Lam 2007) or the College English Curriculum Requirements at university level publicized in 2004 (Lam, Lu and Wu 2007).
The national language policy of China hinges therefore on three related motivations: to enhance literacy, to assure internal stability and to strengthen the nation with the acquisition of knowledge and economic progress so as to forestall foreign aggression. Such an agenda requires societal, if not individual, trilingualism: competence in Putonghua and English as well as a local/home Chinese dialect, if Putonghua is not normally spoken in the learner’s locale/
home (for the Han Chinese) or a minority language (for the minorities). In terms of literacy, since all Chinese dialects map onto one Chinese script, Han Chinese learners only need to be biliterate (in Chinese and English) while minority learners may need to be triliterate (in Chinese, English and a minor-ity language), if their minorminor-ity language has a written form. At the moment, 44 per cent of the officially recognized minority groups (24 out of the 55 groups) still do not have officially codified scripts for their languages. While national needs seem to call for societal trilingualism, the official rhetoric tends to emphasize only bilingualism: Putonghua and English for the Han Chinese and Chinese and a minority language or, at least, a minority culture for the minorities. Perhaps the state does not wish to overtly antagonize minority communities (and, to some extent, speakers of southern Chinese dialects) by explicitly burdening them with heavier language requirements, as compared with the efforts the northern Han Chinese need to invest in their language
learning because the northern Chinese dialects are closer to Putonghua, the standard Chinese dialect.
In view of the political sensitivity, the implicit trilingual and biliterate–
triliterate model in China is only partially supported by explicit legislation.
The Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guojia Tongyong Yuyan Wenzi Fa (The Law on Language Use of the People’s Republic of China), announced on 31 October 2000 and effective from 1 January 2001, reaffirms the official posi-tion since the mid-1950s – that Putonghua and standardized characters are the speech and the script to be used throughout the nation (Article 2) but minority groups still have the freedom to use and develop their own languages (Article 8) (Editorial Committee, China Education Yearbook 2001: 813).
Although Putonghua has been required as a medium of instruction for all Han Chinese schools, the law does not forbid the use of other Chinese dialects at home or in other informal circumstances. Likewise, the teaching of English as a compulsory subject at school from around Primary 3 to both the Han Chinese and minority learners (wherever circumstances permit) is only sup-ported by recommendations in the syllabus and various policy announce-ments from the Ministry of Education (Lam 2005: 191) but not required by legislation. This should not be surprising as the learning of foreign languages is not always required by law in most countries. So China is not unusual in this regard. Because the law is silent on the promotion of English, the official rhetoric concerning language learning for both the Han Chinese and the minorities can therefore emphasize bilingualism, sidestepping the problems an explicit trilingual model may entail. The Han Chinese are encouraged to become bilingual in Putonghua and English while the minorities are encour-aged to become bilingual in their own minority language and Putonghua; in actual practice, most of the minorities have to learn a local Chinese dialect before they learn Putonghua and learn English as well if they wish to succeed in mainstream education.
The official policy target of bilingualism in Chinese and a minority lan-guage for the minorities is already a most significant change in policy stance from that in the 1950s and has become more overt only from around 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated. In the early years of the PRC, the minor-ities enjoyed greater cultural and linguistic autonomy; there was little system-atic effort to assimilate them into the Greater Han culture then. The late 1950s and early 1960s marked a period of an unstable policy towards minority languages. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), minority cultures and languages were suppressed. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the positive
official policy towards minority groups was restored. But after 1991, China seemed to be more concerned that her minorities should be more integrated into the national culture so that they would not develop separatist tendencies like the ethnicities in the former Soviet Union (Lam 2005: 123–30). Hence, while the Chinese Constitution still supports minority language rights, the current realities are complex and greatly depend on the position adopted by local authorities, varying from promotion to permission or mere tolerance of such rights (Zhou, 2005). (This section has been adapted from Lam 2007a.)
This brief summary serves to illustrate the complexity of language trading at the policy level in China. It is a fine balancing act that China has been per-forming in its attempt to negotiate its way through various motivations by adopting an explicit policy of bilingualism in rhetoric and legislation while implementing, if but partially, an implicit model of trilingualism in practice.