The history and policy of Bilingual education in Chinese Minority Ethnic Groups
Embryonic stage: Before the establishment of People’s Republic of China
Minority groups have realized that it is necessary to learn Chinese and Chinese culture during the process of development. There are several educational forms during this period of time. Some students take courses in unofficial occasions, such as home, while some of them take courses in school. Both organized educational training and civilian self-initiative training exist in bilingual education. As for teaching and learning contents, some of them are ethnic language-oriented, some of them are Chinese-dominated and some cover both. Although bilingual education has some development and there is some increase in the numbers of bilinguals before the establishment of People’s Republic of China, literate people in Chinese minority ethnic groups only constitute a small part. Among these literate people, most of them belong to upper-class whereas most underprivileged people still remain illiterate. Furthermore, ethnic languages are prejudiced due to the ethnic oppression. For example, during the last years of Emperor Guangxu, many Chinese schools were set up in Xinjiang and teachers only taught Uyghur students Chinese and Confucianism, which caused strong dissatisfaction. (Wang, 2003) In sum, in this stage, bilingual education has not been popularized or guided by scientific theory, instead, it is mainly based on actual needs.
The first pluralistic stage (1949 to mid-1950s)
At the beginning of the foundation of PRC, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) need to unite all political forces in this country to make the central government stable(Zhou, 2001). During this period of time, it adopted a pluralistic minorities policy and made efforts to eliminate the discrimination against minority ethnic groups. In 1951, on the first national conference, three decisions regarding bilingual education were made:
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In minority regions, subject courses should be taught in commonly used written minority languages
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Local government have the right to decide the proportion of Chinese courses in their curriculum
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Central government need to carry out policies for minority groups that do not have writing systems
(Zhou, 2001)
In this stage, government showed great support and respect to minority languages and many policies were made to help minority groups maintain their languages.
The Chines-monopolistic stage (late-1950s to Cultural Revolution)
During this period of time, bilingual education was discouraged and Chinese became the official language in minority regions. Minority languages were regarded as backwardness and was pressed to make room for education in Chinese only (Zhou, 2001). Requests for bilingual education and minority curriculum were regarded as the opposition of socialism (Nelson, 2005). Assimilation became the goal for minority education and bilingual education was shocked and impacted. Language policy during this period of time made bilingual education more difficult and make minority languages inferior. For example, “the creation or revision of minority language writing systems should follow the newly Published Plan for Phonetic Spelling of Chinese (Seybolt &Chiang, 1979, pp.236-237). Further, the textbook used by minority student must be adopted or translated from Chinese textbooks. During this period of time, the development of bilingual education was blocked.
The second pluralistic stage (1978-now)
After the turmoil in the second stage, CCP have taken efforts to revive minority languages and culture. Chinese government readopted the pluralistic minorities policy and legitimated bilingual education in minority groups (Zhou, 2001). Many language policies have been carried out to support bilingual education. During this period of time, government not only shows respect for minorities’ language and culture but also makes relatively reasonable policies to help minority people learn Chinese. Assimilation is not the goal; instead, helping minority people better integrate into mainstream culture is the point. Therefore, the Laws on Regional National Autonomy of the People’s Republic of China stipulate: schools which mainly recruit minority students need to provide Chinese literacy courses for students in the upper grades of primary school and students in middle school. This is important because Chinese has already become the common language among different ethnic groups and learning Chinese is of great importance for the development in minority regions. (Central Government of the People’s Republic of China, 2005)
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However, in the implementation of bilingual education in Chinese minority ethnic groups, there are still some challenges and difficulties that need to be paid attention to.