When China established that English would be a compulsory subject in primary school, everyone thought about the beginning of a new opening towards the rest of the world. It was 2001, in the same year he joined the World Trade Organization, not surprisingly. The education ministry had considered that institutionalizing global language learning would guide the national strategy to “tackle modernization, the world and the future.”
It hasn’t been long since then, but that international thrust seems completely lost today. “Two decades later, in the midst of a wave of nationalism, the English fell out of favor,” writes The Economist. “Passengers on the subway in Beijing, the capital, will notice that the language has been removed from some station signs and maps (often replaced with pinyin, the form of Romanization, that is, of transcription in Latin characters, of the Mandarin). The province of Hainan has launched a campaign to “clean up and rectify” the names of kindergartens by eliminating a number of words, including “world”, “global”, “bilingual” and “international”.
Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the following year he was appointed president of the People’s Republic of China. Precisely in 2013 he established a tightening of controls on diplomats, journalists and foreign students in China. A change of course indicated in the “Document n. 9 ”, which warned about the“ dangerous values of the West ”which would like to“ infiltrate the Chinese ideological sphere ”.
Xi Jinping’s first decade at the helm of the country was marked by a initially veiled, then increasingly evident, distrust of foreigners. Just three years ago, the People’s Daily, an official spokesperson for the Party, ran an argument in favor of multilingualism: the article said that nearly 200 million Chinese students had taken foreign language lessons in 2018, from elementary school to university. The vast majority of them were learning English.
But the last few years have turned the scenario upside down: “The pandemic has sharpened China’s turnaround,” writes the Economist. Covid has convinced Beijing to close its borders – almost completely – for almost two years and the “zero Covid” policy is also a signal sent to the world: China can win any battle in its own way, with its ideas and its own Strength.
The first missionary schools in English were founded in Macau in the 1830s, shortly after China’s first contacts with the English language, which took place between Chinese and English traders. But such a different, exotic and distant language would not really enter the common language in a short time: only three centuries later would English become popular in such a vast territory.
Need a fast forward in the first half of the twentieth century to rediscover the large-scale and institutionalized teaching of the language of Shakespeare in China, again thanks to missionary schools and thirteen Christian colleges in the area. But with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Russian became the primary foreign language, while English was condemned on the altar of the Cultural Revolution.
Everything changed very quickly in the 1970s, particularly after the visit of US President Richard Nixon in 1972. In 1978, around 500,000 people in China subscribed to Learning English magazine and in 1982 the BBC’s “Follow Me” program had about 10 million households in China as viewers.
The current Prime Minister Li Keqiang, the former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and many leaders of the Party have grown up and studied in the tail of the twentieth century in which English has become popular again. Thanks to the “open door policy” (Open door policy) decided by Deng Xiaoping. Learning English overlapped and was identified with China’s policies of reform and opening up, those that in just a few decades transformed an impoverished and hermetic nation into the second largest economy in the world.
The arrival of the third millennium seemed to have to open the doors of China to a new international and internationalist spirit. But it didn’t happen that way. The Englishman lost some of his charm after the 2008 financial crisis, and Xi Jinping’s arrival in power has definitely reversed the course.
“Today English has become one of the signs of suspicious foreign influence, a fear fueled by nationalist propaganda,” wrote the New York Times in a long article published last September.
Some experts have called the phenomenon “reversal” or “great leap backward”, distorting some expressions of the Chinese historical narrative: an allusion to the disastrous industrialization campaign of the late 1950s, which caused the worst famine caused by man in human history.
Perhaps it is the end of an era, the result of an authoritarian and nationalist policy. The Communist Party is building a network of ideological control and nationalistic propaganda that – in essence – risks turning the clock back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was closed to much of the world and political campaigns canceled economic growth.
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