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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.”<\/p>\n
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<\/em>, 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”.<\/p>