This passage is taken from David Moser's book A Billion Voices. Honestly I would just as soon post the whole book here because I loved it so much. I don't know the guy or anything, but if this is at all interesting to you, I HIGHLY recommend you grab it on Amazon Kindle. It's cheap and a delightful read.
Anyways, there are at least a half dozen absolutely golden nuggets in what I've included here. I will share a couple specific parts that I particularly like in the comments if you're not interested in reading the whole thing, but I promise it's worth it. I just want to hear what all you brilliant people with varying experiences have to say.
Here it goes:
Putonghua in the Classroom
If you want to get a nation all speaking the same language you’ve got to start by indoctrinating the kids. Thus, the promulgation of Putonghua in primary and secondary education has been the most systematic and least controversial aspect of the language unification agenda. With the exception of certain ethnic minority areas, starting from 1956, most primary and middle schools throughout China began a push to either make Putonghua the language of classroom instruction, or to teach it as a second language. Success in these measures varied considerably, based on the linguistic disparity between the Putonghua standard and the local dialect, as well as access to texts and educational materials. Due to the lack of qualified teachers, and an imperfect understanding of the problems of bilingual education in dialect areas, Putonghua instruction in the early years was somewhat unsystematic and poorly monitored. The results in the decades since the policies were implemented have been a qualified success, though the reforms remain a work in progress.
Article 10 of the 2001 ‘Language Law of the People’s Republic of China’ makes Putonghua the default language of instruction, stipulating: ‘Putonghua and the standardised Chinese characters shall be used as the basic language in education and teaching in schools and other institutions of education, except where otherwise provided for in laws.’ The official policy continues to make the distinction between ethnic languages (e.g. Tibetan or Uyghur) and Sinitic dialects (fangyan e.g. Cantonese or Shanghainese). The language of instruction in dialect areas is Putonghua, whereas school systems in ethnic minority areas are only required to train students who are proficient in both Putonghua and the local language; the right to some degree of bilingualism is constitutionally guaranteed. However, the continued survival of minority languages is very much an active concern, and represents a growing crisis for the language policy.
Obviously, implementation of the Putonghua policy has been most successful in northern Mandarin areas, where the local speech is closest to the Putonghua phonology and grammar. In regions where the language is quite different, some degree of bilingualism still remains the norm. Other factors play a role, as well. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘The mountain is high and the emperor is far away’ and it is still difficult to get remote regions of the country on board with the Department of Education guidelines. The success in student achievement of Putonghua fluency in general depends upon factors such as whether the regional form of speech is a ‘high prestige’ dialect such as Cantonese or Shanghainese, and whether the region is economically advanced, with high mobility and contact with the outside world.59
Teacher training is important, as well. In principle, all language teachers should be tested for appropriate standards using the 1994 national Putonghua proficiency test. In practice, a great many teachers in remote regions remain woefully undertrained, and it is fair to say that most do not speak Putonghua as their native language, and thus have not mastered the Beijing-based pronunciation.
Pinyin to the rescue. The romanisation system developed by Zhou Youguang is still the cornerstone of teaching the phonology of Putonghua, and this function is facilitated by the use of pinyin printed on top of the characters in primary school textbooks for Chinese in the first several years of primary school. Students are gradually weaned off of pinyin-annotated texts in the course of the next few years, though pinyin is always used as a pronunciation aid in the introduction of new characters. You have to feel sorry for Chinese school kids. In the first years of their basic education they must study and master two script systems, one foreign, the other familiar but devilishly hard to write and unreasonably time-consuming to memorise.
Schools in dialect regions are instructed to encourage Putonghua use both inside and outside of the classroom, and schools typically put up signs and posters in halls and classrooms exhorting students to speak Putonghua. Since 1998 PRC language planners have mandated an annual ‘Putonghua Promotion Week’, and a series of slogans are circulated to encourage children to proactively speak the language. Such slogans usually strongly associate speaking Putonghua with patriotism, good citizenship, social values, and even a sense of national identity. Chinese kids can be forgiven for having the impression that failure to speak Putonghua is virtually tantamount to treason. Here are some examples:
‘Love the national flag, sing the national anthem, speak Putonghua.’ (Ài guóqí, chàng guógē, shuō Pǔtōnghuà 爱国旗，唱国歌，说普通话)
‘I am a China kid, I love to speak Putonghua.’ (Wǒ shì Zhōngguó wá, ài shuō Pǔtōnghuà. 我是中国娃，爱说普通话)
‘Vigorously promote Putonghua, strengthen the cohesiveness of the Chinese nation.’ (Dàlì tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà, zēngqiáng Zhōnghuá mínzú níngjùlì. 大力推广普通话，增强中华民族凝聚力)
The subtext of these slogans is clear enough. Since its inception, the national language policy was never only about the pragmatic goal of facilitating communication; politics was always part of the agenda. During the reform movements of the twentieth century, there was always a tension between accommodation and assimilation, between a pluralistic tolerance for ethnic and linguistic co-existence, and a more conservative impulse toward uniformity. With regards to its Putonghua policy, China has never quite reconciled these two oppositional forces.
In recent decades there has been a rhetorical shift from the use of Zhonghua renmin, 中华人民, ‘The Chinese people’, to Zhonghua minzu, 中华民族, ‘the Chinese nation’ in referring to the people of China. (Note president Xi Jinping’s call for ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing, 中华民族伟大复兴.) This change signals a shift of focus from the original notion of China as a communist state encompassing several different ethnic groups to a national state with one unified minzu. But as mentioned earlier, the problem lies precisely with this problematic word minzu. Should it be interpreted as simply ‘the nation’, or does it also encompass meanings such as ‘a people’, ‘an ethnic group’? Whatever the case, the Putonghua promotion slogans are clear; the central purpose of teaching the common language to children is to instil a sense of cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders.
Arguably, the most effective cultural force for the spread of Putonghua among children is television. Just as generational differences in regional accents throughout the world have been diluted or erased due to the influence of broadcast media, in China as well, regional forms of speech are losing out to the common language. The Party is well aware of this fact, of course, and it partly explains the obsession with creating and maintaining a monolingual media environment. By this time, several generations of kids have essentially learned how to speak from watching TV, and the trajectory for many of the less prominent local dialects is clear. However, it is equally clear that the utopian goal of ‘one people, one language’ pursued by many of the early language reformers is not a likely outcome, either. Some of the dialects are pushing back.
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