A top university in northwest China has scrapped English tests as a prerequisite for graduation, rekindling a heated debate about the role of the world’s lingua franca in the country’s education system after years of rising nationalist sentiment under leader Xi Jinping.
In a notice Wednesday, the Xi’an Jiaotong University in the capital city of Shaanxi province said students will no longer need to pass a nationwide standardized English test – nor any other English exams – to be able to graduate with bachelor’s degrees.
The announcement caused a stir on social media, with many praising the decision and calling for more universities to do the same.
“Very good. I hope other universities will follow suit. It’s ridiculous that Chinese people’s academic degrees need to be validated by a foreign language (test),” said a comment with more than 24,000 likes on microblogging site Weibo, where a related hashtag attracted more than 350 million views Thursday.
Passing the College English Test, a national standardized exam first held in 1987, has been a graduation requirement at the majority of Chinese universities for decades – although the government has never made it an official policy.
The common practice underlined the importance Chinese universities placed on English – the world’s predominant academic and scientific language – especially when the once-insular and impoverished country was opening up and eager to catch up with the developed world after the turbulence of the Mao Zedong era.
But in recent years, some universities have downgraded the importance of English, either by replacing the national College English Test with their own exams or – as in the case of the Xi’an Jiaotong University – dropping English qualifications altogether as a graduation criteria.
The goal of this is clearly
- to garner pro chinese nationalist public support
- to prevent your smartest students from seeing better opportunities outside of the country
There is no small number of highly educated chinese that leave the country.
“English is important, but as China develops, English is no longer that important,” said a Weibo post from a nationalist influencer with 6 million online followers after the university’s announcement.
“It should be the turn for foreigners to learn Chinese,” the influencer said.
The downgrade comes as China turns more nationalist and inward under Xi, who has called on the country to strengthen “cultural confidence” and fend off “Western influence.”
In schools and universities, teachers have been forbidden from using Western textbooks or talking about “Western values” such as democracy, press freedom and judicial independence.
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FYI you can type in any pictographic language using a regular keyboard. You can switch between languages on the fly too (windows+spacebar on Windows), it’s pretty handy.
I point this out cause people often mention that as a reason they don’t want to learn a different language
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but why would I learn Chinese?
That’s an odd thing to say. Why learn any language? It’s fun, you learn things and it lets you talk to people and engage in things you wouldn’t be able to.
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There are many new technical papers that are only written in Chinese these days, especially in AI.
English speakers really showing themselves in here, huh? I get it, English is my native language too, and it’s definitely convenient for us that others have to learn the language I already know, but you’re being very hypocritical when you say things like “why do I have to learn Chinese?!” You’re also missing the point of the move because this story is about removing the obligation to learn another language. Yes, English is currently the dominant language in a number of areas, but then so was German in the scientific world over a century ago. These things can change, and if that scares you, then I would like you to ask yourself why.
