Lessons In Being Chinese

This comparative study of the Naxi and Tai minority groups in Southwestern China examines the implementation and reception of state minority education policy. Hansen (Center for Development and the Environment, U. of Oslo) argues that state policy is not uniformly successful among all minorities, no

Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this comparative study of the implementation and reception of state minority education policy in the People’s Republic of China. Based on field research and historical sources, Lessons in Being Chinese argues that state policy, which is intended to be applied uniformly across all minority regions, in fact is much more successful in some than in others. In Lijiang, elite members of the Naxi ethnic group (minzu) have a centuries-old connection with Chinese state educational systems as avenues to social mobility, and have continued this tradition under Communist rule. They participate enthusiastically in the present system, using education to gain official and professional positions. In contrast to the Lijiang area, Sipsong Panna functioned in many ways as a separate kingdom until 1950, with its own script and a separate educational system centered in Theravada Buddhist monasteries. Today, many Tai in that area still prefer monastic education for their sons, and most parents are indifferent to state education. This study finds that standardized, homogenizing state education is in itself incapable of instilling in students an identification with the Chinese state, ironically often increasing ethnic identity. Lessons in Being Chinese enhances our understanding of how state policy toward minorities works in many areas of life, and its conclusions can be extended well beyond the sphere of education. It will be of interest to both anthropologists and educators.

"A highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China's hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future."—The New York Times Book Review As one the first American students admitted to China after the communist revolution, John Pomfret was exposed to a country still emerging from the twin tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Crammed into a dorm room with seven Chinese men, Pomfret contended with all manner of cultural differences, from too-short beds and roommates intent on glimpsing a white man naked, to the need for cloak-and-dagger efforts to conceal his relationships with Chinese women. Amidst all that, he immersed himself in the remarkable lives of his classmates. Beginning with Pomfret's first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us down the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982: Old Wu's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; and Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As Pomfret follows his classmates from childhood to adulthood, he examines the effect of China's transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism. The result is an illuminating report from present-day China, and a moving portrait of its extraordinary people.

Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language-a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar-became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones-the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning-is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.

In twenty-first-century China, socialist educational traditions have given way to practices that increasingly emphasize the individual. This volume investigates that trend, drawing on Hansen's fieldwork in a rural high school in Zhejiang where students, teachers, and officials of different generations, genders, and social backgrounds form what is essentially a miniature version of Chinese society. Hansen paints a complex picture of the emerging “neosocialist” educational system and shows how individualization of students both challenges and reinforces state control of society.

Jan Cross, a recent graduate from the University of Mississippi, is on a plane headed for Beijing, China to teach English at a Chinese university. Struggling to free herself of her ultra-independent behavior, she intentionally places herself in a situation that forces her to depend on others for help. Jan gets much more than she bargained for as she experiences a culture that is worlds apart from her beloved southern town of Jasper, Mississippi, USA. Jan quickly learns that as a visitor and an employee, you don t mess with the Chinese government or the University! The challenges of living and working abroad change her forever as she gives and receives lessons inside and outside of the classroom on life, social practices, politics, and the deep bond of friendship. Lessons from China is a heartwarming exploration of China that innocently, and often humorously, takes into account the many differences and similarities to US culture through the eyes of a young American and first-time traveler. Providing an inside view of Chinese culture, economic development, and bits of historical background, this story delivers the hope and beauty of diversity and cultural acceptance between East and West."

This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.