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Language Planning in China Yuming Li (2015) Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Review Language planning in China Yuming Li (2015) Berlin and Beijing: Mouton de Gruyter and Commercial Press ISBN 978-1-61451-558-6. Pp. 490 Reviewed by Minglang Zhou To put into context this collection of 30 articles written by Li Yuming, I believe that readers need two important pieces of background information. First, these articles were written by Li Yuming both as a scholar and a state language planner. Mr. Li is an authentic scholar, unlike some Chinese officials with doctoral degrees that were completed by their assistants. He is a member of the crop of Chinese officials promoted during the 1980s and early 1990s when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) followed the principle that experts of the field supervise and manage the field in China’s earlier Four Modernizations effort. Secondly, these articles were written by Li Yuming after 2001 when China began to implement ‘The PRC State Common Language and Script Law’, a law that is underlined by an ideology of complementary multilingualism and designed to develop a language order of structured multilingualism. This national ideology supports Putonghua (Mandarin) as the national and global language while treating minority languages as complementary transitions to Putonghua. The language order so envisioned designates most of the resources, such as domains of language use, funds, legal standing, medium of instruction, etc. to Putonghua as the state common language, whereas allocating just enough or barely sufficient resources for minority languages to survive as transitional languages. Having the Affiliation University of Maryland, College Park, United States email: [email protected] SOLS VOL 11.2–4 2017 479–482 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.33807 © 2018, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 480 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES context in place I will review these chapters from five perspectives: language as a problem, a resource and a right, as well as Mr. Li as a state language planner and a scholar. I will group the chapters under these five perspectives, since it is impossible to review the thirty articles one by one in the given space. Chapter 1 of the collection lays out the foundation of Mr. Li’s fundamental views of language planning, recognizing language as a problem, a resource and a right, the last of which was the first issue that Mr. Li and I ever discussed during my lecture on linguistic rights as human rights in Beijing in early 2000. Mr. Li is among the few Chinese officials who fully recognizes citizens’ rights to their mother tongue. In chapter 2, he further makes a distinction between mother tongue and mother dialect/speech, a distinction that reflects his efforts at the puzzle between language and dialect in the Chinese context, where there is a long-term struggle between monolingualism and multilingualism. This distinction is significantly meaningful, as far as linguistic rights are concerned, when the conflict between, for instance, Putonghua and Cantonese or between Putonghua and Shanghainese arises, where the former is considered the mother tongue whereas the latter as the mother speech. Mr. Li gives extensive coverage of the issue of language as a resource. Along this line, he considers languages as hard power (ch. 5) and languages as capabilities. He further elaborates on language as a resource for the state as part of national capabilities and for citizens as individual proficiencies or competence (ch. 4). National language capabilities include both Chinese and foreign languages which can enable China to rise as a global power and empower Chinese citizens’ competitiveness in globalization (ch. 9). Moreover, national language capabilities include various Chinese dialects and minority languages since the development of bilingual and bi-dialectal capabilities is supposed to enhance China’s national identity and unity (ch. 12). Following his views on language as a resource, Mr. Li gives special consideration to two types of China’s national language capabilities, Chinese as a global language and the Chinese language’s presence in cyberspace. First, Mr. Li holds that as China rises economically, there is a market for Chinese as a second language and China should take this opportunity to expand its international reach (ch. 23). For this reason, China should first study how Chinese spread beyond its borders in the past (ch. 24) and should improve the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (ch. 25). Second, Mr. Li strongly believes that cyberspace is the new frontier for the status, maintenance and survival of languages and that China should adopt a clear language policy for it (ch. 18). He argues for both uplifting traditional tasks in language planning and opening new ones (ch. 19). REVIEW: ZHOU 481 Specifically, he focuses on the adjustment of language standardization to cyberspace (chs. 20 and 21) as well as on the construction of databases for e- dictionaries (ch. 16) and machine language processing (chs. 13 and 22). As a state language planner, Mr. Li has to confront language as a ‘problem’, which involves modernization and standardization as solutions. He traces China’s nineteenth-century efforts to modernize Chinese in the form of phoneticization (attempts to replace Chinese characters with alphabetic spelling) (ch. 26) and relates this movement to the modernization of Chinese education and even China itself (ch. 27). As state solutions to linguistic diversity, Mr. Li discusses the role of the selected dialect for status planning (chs. 10 and 11), approaches to lexical standardization (chs. 14 and 15) and China’s historic approaches to language standardization (chs. 28, 29 and 30). As a language planner, Mr. Li starts from traditional status planning and corpus planning and further develops these to functional planning and field planning. He lists eight categories of functional domains for planning: national language, official language, education, mass media, public service, public communication, culture, and daily/family communication (ch. 3). The last six are well-established domains of language use where language functions may be managed. Official language is not really a domain but can be extended to government language use that can also be planned. However, the functional domain of the national language is less clear and needs to be spelled out in more detail. Further, Mr. Li considers the next lower level of language planning to be field planning, which covers language planning for every walk of life, such as different industries, different kinds of commerce and different kinds of occupations (ch. 7). It includes the standardization of both spoken and written language of the field and training of employees in the use of the standard language of the field while at work. As a scholar, Mr. Li’s greatest contribution to the field of language planning, I believe, is his concept of language life (yuyan shenghuo). This is a concept that is still developing, as his new writings on this this topic appeared as late as 2016. Mr. Li defines three major levels of language life: macro-level, meso-level and micro-level (ch. 6). The macro-level includes national language life and supranational language life, the meso-level covers field and regional language life and the micro-level comprises both family and individual language life. With the guidance of this conceptual framework, Mr. Li has proposed field language planning and sponsored the publication of an annual report on the status of languages and dialects as well as on their use, which is officially titled ‘Green Paper on the Language Situation in China’ in English. This annual report is considered a measurement of China’s language planning, a reference for 482 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES government decision-making and a service to interested parties (ch. 17). Mr. Li believes that this conceptual framework provides a better understanding of the current language situation in China and helps the government to manage this language situation better (ch. 8). Readers who are not familiar with language planning and the current language situation in China might find it a challenge to reach a full understanding of some terms and concepts in this collection. For example, what does ‘language life’ exactly mean? What is the English equivalent currently used in the field? I find two translations of the same Chinese term ‘yuyan shenghuo’, one being ‘language situation’ in chapter 17 and the other being ‘language life’ everywhere else in the collection. As far as I understand it, the concept of language life includes language use, language management and languages. In this sense, ‘language situation’ may be a better translation. However, ‘shenghuo’ is a productive term in Chinese, which is commonly used to characterize many types of social activities in China, such as ‘cultural activities’ (wenhua shenghuo) and ‘the communist party’s activities for its members’ (dang zuzhi shenghuo). All these terms suggest that ‘shenghuo’ (life) refers to activities that people can engage in or ‘life’ that people live. In this sense, ‘language life’ might be a better trans- lation, particularly if language life is considered to have an activity system (language use and management) and a non-activity system (languages), in addition to the three major levels of life. A minor issue of this collection is the organization of the thirty articles with no apparent link. Its readability may be greatly enhanced if the articles were organized under a number of thematic subsections with a brief introduction to each subsection. In short, I believe that this is a great collection of articles on language planning in contemporary China. It provides deep insights into China’s language ideology, order, policy and management. It helps readers to understand what is going on linguistically both in China and globally. Moreover, the collection gives readers a different perspective of language planning, a perspective from a state language planner, a perspective from the East and a perspective from a rising global power.
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