Academic literature on the topic 'Linguistic colonialism and the hegemonic power of English'

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of the English language in China. At the end of the 1970s, as China was emerging from the political maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution, English was spoken by only a relative handful of academics, foreigners, translators, and interpreters. English became a required subject when university entrance examinations were reinstated in 1978, and foreign language education began to take off again in the early 1980s at the beginning of the “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) period, a time when the socialist ethos of state, economy, and society was gradually dismantled in favor of a model of explosive economic growth and private individualism. Ultimately, the prominence of English in China today is the result of historical relations of colonialism and power that forged its global presence and the hierarchical ordering of linguistic inequality. The chapter then presents an overview of contemporary speech practices and English language learning in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. It also considers two of the concepts that Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin pioneered: heteroglossia and the chronotope.