Table Of ContentAlexandraGrey
LanguageRightsinaChangingChina
Contributions to the
Sociology of Language
Edited by
Ofelia García
Francis M. Hult
Founding editor
Joshua A. Fishman
Volume 113
Alexandra Grey
Language Rights
in a Changing
China
A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study
ISBN978-1-5015-1774-7
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InmemoryofHannahYiu.
Preface
In my journey to a research problem centered on languages in the South of
China, I gathered many photographs of places and people. The small selec-
tion in Figures 1 to 3, all from cities in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous
Region (GZAR) in South China, indicate how everyday urban streetscapes
and associated language practices in China have changed since the middle
of the twentieth century. Moreover, the obvious changes in public, urban
life revealed in these photographs hint at potentially significant changes in
linguistic, social and cultural spheres of life that photographs cannot cap-
ture. What language varieties did the photographed soldiers, pedestrians
and cyclists use? How did their language practices, and views about them,
change along with the enormous transformations in Chinese society during
this time?
Figure1:Urbanmainstreet,unspecifiedcityinGZAR,circa1940sfrom(LiandGZARAreal
AnnalsCompilationCommittee2010:308,withthankstoparticipant“MrS”).
OneofthetransformationsevidentinthesephotographsistheadditionofEnglish
onsignagebythetwenty-firstcentury,whilewrittenMandarinisafixtureacross
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512551-202
VIII Preface
Figure2:Photographscaptioned“MainstreetofKweilin[Guilin]”,GZAR,1976,photographed
bytheauthor’smother,reprintedwithpermission.
Figure3:AmainstreetofGuilin,GZAR,2015,photographedbytheauthorduringfieldwork.
the span of these photographs. However, the photographs show a striking ab-
senceofZhuanglanguage.ZhuanglanguageisaTailanguage–notaMandarin
language–anditwasconsideredsowidelyspokenanddefiningofethnicitythat
the Zhuangzu minority group was recognized by the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) government and named after the language in the early 1950s. Then the
Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region was namedafter – and for – this group
in 1958. (NB. I use ‘the PRC’ instead of China only whenI need to disambiguate
thecurrentnationfromitsforebears.)Moreover,thisareawaswheretheZhuang
Preface IX
dialectsoriginated.YetZhuangdoesnotappearonanyofthesignsinthesepho-
tographs. Rather, in the pre-communist era shown in Figure 1, public texts are
prevalent in the urban streetscape, mostly commercial slogans in Mandarin
exclusively using traditional characters. In the 1970s (Figure 2), by contrast,
largesignageseemsabsentfromastreetscapedesignedforpedestrians,cyclists
andminimalcommerce.Thesmallsignsthatarevisibleontherightinthispho-
tograph are written in simplified Mandarin characters; many are indistinct but
on close inspection, one says 拉链 (zipper) i.e. a repair shop. Nowadays, as
Figure3shows,amixtureoflargecommercialandorientationtexts,designedto
be visible to motorists, dominate the urban streetscape. In addition to the
Mandarin insimplified characterson thiscontemporarysignage,the Roman al-
phabetnowalsohasavisiblepresence,usedbothforEnglishandastheofficial
auxiliaryPinyinscriptfor the national language, Putonghua (officially standard-
izedMandarin).
Thesesimpleobservationspointtoanintriguinginterplaybetweenlanguage
practicesandpoliticalandeconomictransformations.Moreover,asnotedbythe
renownedcontemporarysociolinguist,MonicaHeller(2003:473),changesrelat-
ingtoeconomicglobalizationinthelatetwentiethcenturyareinseparablefrom
transformations to languages and identities. Economic globalization reached
China–orrather,Chinalauncheditselfintoeconomicglobalization–after1978.
Thisglobalizedandstillglobalizingcontextoughtthereforebeaninseparablepart
ofmyresearchintolanguageandidentityinChina.
Hellergoesontomakethepointthatprocessesofeconomic,linguisticand
identitychangecanbeviewedwithparticularclaritythroughthe“window”of
ethnolinguistic minoritygroups. Thatis, groupslike theZhuangzu offer a way
to re-focus an examination into China’s processes of change under conditions
ofglobalizationfromitsmorevisible,mainstreamaspectstothemarginalexpe-
riences.Lookingagainatmyselectionofphotographs,whichareanotherkindof
window, we may wonder especially how China’s opening-up has transformed
languagesandidentitiesinGZAR.
Thisquestionstruckmeandgraduallyclarifiedintoaresearchproject,after
ImovedtoChinain2010.China’sethnolinguisticdiversityoftencameupincon-
versationsasbothasourceofprideandaproblem,but–asinthephotographs–
thisdiversitywasinvisibletomewithineverydaylinguisticlandscapes.Walking
the streets of Beijing, where I then lived, I saw mainly Putonghua and some
English, much like in Figure 3. Ethnolinguistic minorities seemed to exist more
in rhetoric than reality in Beijing; while I knew minority people continued to
liveandspeakvariouslanguagesinperipheralpartsofChina,theywerenotob-
vious in the nation’s urban centers. I travelled through China as much as work
andstudiesallowedme,findingbothhighlevelsofsamenessandhighlevelsof
X Preface
difference. In the northern and southern reaches of the nation, ethnolinguistic
diversitybecamemoreobvioustome.
When I first travelled to the southern periphery, visiting a rice-growing
village and small cities in Guizhou in 2011 and then hiking a tea field route
near the Myanmar border in Yunnan in 2012, I found myself in landscapes
and linguistic soundscapes more different to Beijing than anything I had so
far encountered in China. Although I was also familiar with the rocky Great
WallandthegildedeleganceofImperialChineseart,itwasthis‘other’China
thatresonatedwithme.Andyet,atthesametime,GuizhouandYunnanwere
as similar to Beijing as they were different: there were still Putonghua street
signsinsimplifiedcharactersnamingaPeople’sStreetandaPeople’sSquare
in every city, and there were the same hotpot eateries, China Mobile stores,
advertisements for private English tuition, supermarket chains and China
Central Television (CCTV) soap operas playing on small televisions in guard
posts and tobacconists. People wore the same casual and colorful Western-
inspired clothing (but with less luxury branding outside of Beijing) and the
newairportinJinhong,insouthernYunnan,lookedtobeaminiatureversion
of Beijing’s Capital International Airport. I became ever more intrigued: how
wasdiversity,especiallylinguisticdiversity,continuing,andwhenandwhere
wasitnotcontinuing,givenhighlevelsofinternalmigrationandtheapparent
reachofculturalhomogeneityandtheunifiedmarket?
Wherever I went, I found that locals were, like me, interested in talking
aboutlinguisticdiversity.That,andmyobservationsofthewaylinguisticdiver-
sity was foregrounded and backgrounded in different contexts, motivated me
to study China’s sociolinguistic minorities as my window into China’s fast-
paced political, social and economic transformations. And so I began doctoral
researchin2013.Theendeavoreventuallyculminatedinthisbook,whichIded-
icate to all the colleagues, teachers, students, friends and strangers who have
helpedmebetterknow,seeandhearChina.
