SignsofChangeChineseEnglish,.PDF

‘Signs’ of Change: Chinese English, Hybridity, and Public Media CASSEL BUSSE McMaster University bussecj@mcmaster.ca 1. Introduction WITH THE ACCENSION TO INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION AND THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ‘SUPER POWER’ STATUS, 1 including social and political ‘landmarks’ such as China’s acceptance in the World Trade Organization in 2001, Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics in 2008, and the Shanghai World Expo set for 2010, an increasing amount of attention has been focused on China worldwide —a country which has been described as an unexplored and ‘alien’ territory (Hunter and Sexton 1999, 1) previous to its recent globalization. In its efforts to present a unified and modernized ‘face’ to the world, China has made some serious considerations of its use and presentation of English, the so-called lingua franca of the economic, political, technological and diplomatic world (Kirkpatrick 2007, 155). The tremendous effort in China to match the nation’s revitalized and contemporary ‘face’ through the perfection of English has been no smooth operation. Indeed, this conception of modernization through the English language has been met with conflicts of ideology and identity, particularly on the grounds of national patriotism and ‘purity’. In Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon, Braj B. Kachru describes the presence of English in many Asian countries as characterizing the two faces of Janus–– or, as one chapter title suggests, a ‘schizophrenia’ in language identity (2005, 29). From an essentialist vantage point, the binary opposition of two language ‘faces’ in China are taken up by those that are for the widespread use and standardization of English in China (headed by the Chinese government), and those against the institutionalization of English who view it as the ‘killer language’ (B. Kachru 2005, 165) that could potentially replace Chinese languages and/or contaminate Chinese culture. However, like many things, the language debate in China