Protecting language or promoting dis-citizenship? A poststructural policy analysis of the Shanghainese Heritage Project

ABSTRACT

Recent language policy studies have adopted an integrated approach to the exploration of language use, educational practice, citizenship, global mobility and so forth. While they enhanced interdisciplinary understanding of language policy, the conventional view of policies that address problems has not been explicitly challenged, especially in China. In our study, we adopt a poststructural framework to examine problem representations in public debates over the Shanghainese Heritage Project (SHP), a policy promoting the use of Shanghainese, the local Chinese variety, in kindergartens. Our dataset consists of 279 news articles, 98 online forum threads and 800 social media postings, covering a period from January 2013 to June 2017. The findings suggest that the problem for SHP was officially represented as the declining vitality of Shanghainese, while in unofficial channels the problem was mainly constructed as the conflicts between ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals.’ As a result, children from migrant families may risk being dis-citizened. It is important for language policymakers and educators to be aware of the limitations associated with SHP so that both Shanghainese and other regional Chinese varieties can be maintained in schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Language policy
• language ideologies
• citizenship
• dialect
• medium of instruction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mr. Qing Shao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include linguistic construction of ethnic borders, social theory and education research.

Dr. Xuesong (Andy) Gao is an associate professor in the School of Education, The University of New South Wales. His research interests include language learning strategy, international students in higher education, language teacher education and language education policy.

ORCID

Qing Shao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7111-5193

Xuesong (Andy) Gao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3426-8721

Notes

1. Asterisks here in this username are deliberately used to replace letters for privacy because the username was originally in English. Asterisks in the content of quotations were automatically generated by the censorship mechanism, which is a common practice of cyber administration in China.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [grant number HKU 17402414H].