Globalization and nation-state building are two major factors that have conditioned language education policies in Greater China for over a century. The geopolitics of Greater China (Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) is the result of the global expansion of Western capitalism and colonialism. Conceived in the ideology of one nation, one state, and one language, language education was then among China’s fundamental responses to the West. To this end, the collapsing Qing Dynasty (1616–1911) managed to pass the Resolution on Methods of National Language Standardization (Tongyi guoyu banfa an) in its final year. Since then, language education has always been an important dimension of China’s nation-state building. The Republic of China (1912–present) started with a model of a republic of five ethnic groups (wuzu gonghe) in the 1910s, evolved to that of an inclusive Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu) in the 1940s, and now entertains the latter with more diversity in Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China (1949–present) first followed the Soviet model of multinational state building in the 1950s–1990s and has adopted a Chinese model of one nation with diversity (zhonghua minzu duoyuan yiti) since the late 1990s. These evolving models of nation-state building have essentially shaped language education policies in Greater China. Meanwhile, the impact of that old cycle of globalization is still felt as the politics of language education unfolds in decolonized Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau in the twenty-first century, but the new cycle of globalization of information and mobility sees Chinese as a rising global language.
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