The Future Conditional: Building an English-Speaking Society in Northeast China

By Eric S. Henry

In The Future Conditional, Eric S. Henry brings twelve-years of expertise and research to offer a nuanced discussion of the globalization of the English language and the widespread effects it has had on Shenyang, the capital and largest city of China's northeast Liaoning Province. Adopting an ethnographic and linguistic perspective, Henry considers the personal connotations that English, has for Chinese people, beyond its role in the education system. Through research on how English is spoken, taught, and studied in China, Henry considers what the language itself means to Chinese speakers. How and why, he asks, has English become so deeply fascinating in contemporary China, simultaneously existing as a source of desire and anxiety? The answer, he suggests, is that English-speaking Chinese consider themselves distinctly separate from those who do not speak the language, the result of a cultural assumption that speaking English makes a person modern.

Seeing language as a study that goes beyond the classroom, The Future Conditional assesses the emerging viewpoint that, for many citizens, speaking English in China has become a cultural need—and, more immediately, a realization of one's future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501754913

Book preview

THE FUTURE CONDITIONAL

Building an English-Speaking Society in Northeast China

Eric S. Henry

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For Jing, Layton, Riley, and Tai

Contents

Preface

Note on Transcription

Introduction

1. Dirty Talk

2. The Moral Economy of Walls

3. Better to Die Abroad Than to Live in China

4. Commodifying Language

5. On Chinglish

6. Raciolinguistic Identities

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I first arrived in Shenyang in the bitingly cold winter of 2001 as an English teacher. Snow covered everything, and, driving in from the airport in a taxi with Pony, the school representative sent to meet me, we passed legions of students bundled against the weather; classes were canceled, and students had been organized into work details to chip at the layer of ice on the ground with shovels. A truck driver lay on the road beneath his vehicle, carefully passing a scrap of burning newspaper under his fuel line to defrost it. Everywhere people wrapped themselves in as many layers as possible, and the taste of coal dust from the overworked heating plants was thick on my tongue. Pony was the foreign teacher coordinator for a large private English school offering classes for children, beginning in preschool and often continuing straight through until high school. I had answered an advertisement on the internet only a month previously and, after confirming that I really did speak English, was offered a job to teach twenty hours of classes each week, mostly to children just beginning to learn the language.

For some, this may read as a confession. A renowned historian of China once told me to keep my original employment a secret, presumably lest whatever words that followed be tainted by this corrupting fact. Being an English teacher in China does appear to place one firmly in the camp of young, carefree adventure seekers who strike a kind of Faustian bargain in their new home—they work at a job where the only requirement is acquired in infancy, make scads of money in local terms, and spend all of it on travel and booze before returning home a year or two later. The very nature of the English teacher’s transience weighs against developing any kind of deep understanding of the local culture, and most teachers, even if they end up staying years in the same place, acquire only a limited vocabulary of beer-and taxi-related terms, living in a bubble manufactured by language barriers and ethnocentrism.

But I had just finished a master’s degree in anthropology and, with some debts to pay off and the desire to immerse myself in the language, being an English teacher seemed a way to profitably anchor myself in a foreign place, doing all the preparatory work before I started my real research later on. My goal was to continue ethnographically the largely archival and library-based research of my master’s degree on the confluence between personal and institutional relationships in Chinese business practices. I had argued, in perhaps overly simplistic and prosaic terms, that the transition from a socialist to a market economy encouraged new forms of cooperation between entrepreneurs and government gatekeepers. The overall thesis was sound, but, as I was soon to discover, it was a topic that resisted ethnographic inquiry (although see Osburg 2013). The exercise of personal influence on bureaucratic systems, involving the back and forth flow of gifts and favors, is a sensitive topic. The gray nature of many of these transactions precluded easy investigation through simply interviewing people about them.

Instead, in a story familiar to many anthropologists, my attention was gradually drawn to a topic that people were not only willing to talk about but about which it was difficult to get them to stop talking. Thus, my temporary teaching arrangement, in which I traded my evening and weekend hours as a teacher for an apartment and Mandarin-language classes, became a research topic in itself. People wanted to ask me about English. A lot. And not just in the classroom—in restaurants, in homes, and on the street, people would stop me in midsentence (or sometimes would not even let me start) and ask me about the language. How do I learn it? they wanted to know. Is it hard? What is the best age to begin study? Do you know any tricks or shortcuts to become fluent? The last question often stumped me, not because I didn’t know any tricks (at the time, I thought I knew everything about learning English, and so did most of the other foreign teachers), but because it appeared to equate native linguistic acquisition with pedagogical expertise. Did speaking a language really make me an expert in teaching it? And why was this such an important topic to bring up in the first place?

I slowly came to realize that to treat English acquisition in China as merely a linguistic or educational phenomenon forecloses the possibility of placing it within a broader theoretical frame, one that includes a host of other issues. Viewing English in isolation from China’s other ongoing forms of transformation obscures the connections among them. For instance, in this book I will argue that understanding the use of foreign languages necessitates a discussion of urban renewal and the physical transformation of the city, which further implicates the way Chinese people understand processes of modernization and the logic of the racialized body. By developing this fuller understanding, the choice to speak English becomes one full of signification. An act of performance in a long genre of self-representation in China, English asserts a cosmopolitan and global identity for the speaker, as opposed to a marginalized local one. We can also discern how these performances and identities, although they draw on transnational imagery and ideas, are distinctly Chinese.

The original research for this book, undertaken in 2005, was generously supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Subsequent fieldwork in 2010 was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from SSHRC and in 2013 by Saint Mary’s University. I am deeply indebted to a range of colleagues and scholars who have read and commented on various parts of this manuscript, but a short list would include Elana Chipman, Marcie Middlebrooks, Jessica Falcone, Matt Erie, Kimberly Couvson-Liebe, and Jen Shannon. The overall direction my research has taken was due to advice and input from Andrew Lyons, Harriet Lyons, Tiantian Zheng, Paul Festa, Chantelle Falconer, Pauline McKenzie Aucoin, Ruanni Tupas, Shirley Hall, and Nicole Hayes. P. Steven Sangren, Andrew Willford, and Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shaped my development as an anthropologist, and I am grateful to all of them for the careful attention they paid to my work. I would also like to thank the many other scholars at Cornell who offered advice and guidance: Terry Turner, Magnus Fiskesjö, Frederic Gleach, Kathryn March, David Holmberg, and Jane Fajans, among many others. Tania Li and Jesook Song graciously hosted a doctoral retreat at the University of Toronto that afforded time to write and a critical engagement. I have enjoyed the intellectual kinship offered by colleagues at Carleton University, including Peter Gose, Donna Patrick, Xiaobei Chen, and Zhiqiu Lin; similarly, at Saint Mary’s University I have benefited from the collegiality of Rylan Higgins, Paul Erickson, Marty Zelenietz, Jonathan Fowler, Tanya Peckmann, Michelle MacCarthy, Laura Eastham, Bill Sewell, and Elissa Asp. The editorial team at Cornell University Press, particularly Jim Lance, worked diligently to facilitate the editing and publishing process and deserve my thanks, along with the two anonymous readers who provided generous encouragement and feedback. I am grateful for the time afforded me by Carleton University and Saint Mary’s University to conduct this work in addition to my teaching responsibilities. Finally, I would like to thank the many people who assisted my research in Shenyang, including the many teachers and students who sat for interviews or allowed me to watch their classes.

Readers will notice that a lot of the people I talk about in this book have English names like Charles and Sophia. The choice of which name to use was a deliberate one made by the people I interviewed, and even in interactions with other Chinese they often used English names. Other people have Mandarin names like Liu Xiaohua or Zhang Wen. Again, the choice of name, and language, was deliberate. All of these are pseudonyms, but in picking those pseudonyms I attempted to match the speaker’s chosen language and term of address. The same is true of the schools I describe: all have been given pseudonyms, but ones that reflect the spirit of the originals. In China, surnames precede given names, and I follow this convention in the book when referring to individuals by their Chinese names and to Chinese scholars whose work I discuss.

Two chapters in this book are revised versions of papers previously published elsewhere. Chapter 5 is an improved version of the paper Interpretations of ‘Chinglish’: Native Speakers, Language Learners and the Enregisterment of a Stigmatized Code, published by Language in Society 39 (5): 669–88, while chapter 6 is significantly revised from Emissaries of the Modern: The Foreign Teacher in Urban China, published by City & Society 25 (2): 216–34. Both chapters are included here with the permission of the publishers. Unless otherwise noted, all figures and illustrations are my own.

Note on Transcription

The focus of this book is on discourse and the meaning of one or more types of language in conversation. I have therefore adopted a relatively straightforward transcription system for spoken texts.

The form of English speech has been preserved as accurately as possible to reflect its style and structure. The need to document several linguistic registers in interaction has led me to adopt the following conventions: in spoken and written discourse, English is in plain text. Words and phrases in Mandarin are romanized using the pinyin system. Both untranslated Mandarin words or phrases and discourse translated from spoken or written Mandarin are italicized. The local Dongbei dialect is also underlined. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

INTRODUCTION

The English Modern

A common trope in political writings of China’s socialist era was the notion that the people (renmin), united in common cause, were not simply building machinery or ships or railways but socialism itself. Led by the working class and the Communist Party, wrote Mao Zedong (1977, 384), our 600 million people, united as one, are engaged in the great task of building socialism. The unification of our country, the unity of our people and the unity of our various nationalities—these are the basic guarantees for the sure triumph of our cause. This mobilization of people and production, under the leadership of the Communist Party, was felt to be so strong, so unstoppable, that China would surely supersede the so-called developed countries in a matter of years, constituting nothing less than the rebuilding of the very foundations of Chinese society.

Whether the society that emerged under Mao’s leadership or the one that has taken off following forty years of economic reforms fulfilled this triumphalist vision is a matter of some debate. This book, however, turns our attention to another great undertaking, one more recent but no less ambitious in its scope and revolutionary potential. While Mao saw the people’s task as one of building socialism, the current transformation seeks to radically reconfigure the relationships between self and society, between citizen and the state, and between China and the world. Its goal too is the reinvention of Chinese society, but through the creation of a modern rather than a socialist future, while the means to achieving this end are premised on a range of linguistic and cultural practices. As many people asked me throughout my research, What if everyone in China could speak English?

At the end of the 1970s, as China was emerging from the political maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution, English was spoken by only a relative handful of academics, foreigners, translators, and interpreters. Despite a long history born of colonialism and missionization, the language had been nearly eradicated as a communicative resource due to its association with bourgeois values (Adamson 2004; Ji 2004). English became a required subject when university entrance examinations were reinstated in 1978, and foreign language education began to take off again in the early 1980s at the beginning of the reform and opening up (gaige kaifang) period (Pan 2015a), a time when the socialist ethos of state, economy, and society was gradually dismantled in favor of a model of explosive economic growth and private individualism. The two projects seemed to go hand in hand, as both foreign language education and market reforms oriented the nation away from its insular posture and bridged the divide between China and the West.¹ State educational policies have a habit of falling flat unless they speak to broader social movements and transformations, and, in this case, official support for English was intertwined with an acute desire by Chinese parents, students, and citizens to inculcate this global language as well. Today, by our best estimates, 300 million to 400 million people in China can speak or write English with some manner of fluency (R. Wei and Su 2012). In both size and scope, this transformation represents, quite simply, the largest, most ambitious language learning project in human history.

This is an ethnography of contemporary speech practices and English language learning in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. It is based on sixteen months of research conducted over several trips from 2005 to 2013. Most of that time was spent in private English language training schools (yingyu peixun xuexiao) that complement language teaching in the public school system.² These have become ubiquitous in urban China in recent years, forming a core component of a multibillion-dollar foreign language teaching industry (G. Hu and McKay 2012; L. Wang 2004). As in other Asian countries, families spend a significant portion of their disposable income on private foreign language education for their children, including evening and weekend language classes at these schools found throughout the city.³ I also visited a range of other schools, including senior, middle, and elementary schools, universities, and adult education centers. In all of these, I observed classes taught by multiple teachers at many different levels. I examined textbooks and other teaching materials, participated in pedagogical training, and recorded teacher-student interactions. I spent time with teachers in their offices as they worked with students, prepared for classes, or simply chatted among themselves. But my interests in foreign language in China also took me far beyond the classroom, into people’s homes, public language performances, and local events like school promotions and teacher training seminars. I spoke with students about their motivations and desires for learning English as well as the language’s place in Chinese society more generally. Between the curriculum and the lesson plan is a group of teachers discussing how to convey their ideas to a class. Between educational directives and the school is an administrator trying to appeal to parents to attract more attention and tuition. It is in these points of mediation, in other words, where we might ask how the desire for English is produced and, in turn, how that feeds back into state language policies.

Nearly everyone in the city encounters English on a more or less daily basis. Children learn it in public school from the third grade onward, and almost all students take classes in the private English schools I studied.⁴ Young people need high scores on standardized national English tests to get into good schools, go to good universities, and eventually to get good jobs (L. Cheng 2008; Pan and Block 2011). Adults need English to succeed in professional careers, whether they be cops, lawyers, architects, bankers, or businesspeople. It is needed—or at least thought to be needed—to go abroad, to deal with foreigners, to participate in international events, or to take advantage of global opportunities (V. Fong 2011; Weihong Wang 2015). English words and phrases can be found on signs, menus, and consumer products throughout the city, spoken on radio and television by everyone from celebrities to street cleaners, and pop up in conversation among urban citizens on an everyday basis.⁵ English is associated with wealth, civilized behavior, modernity, commerce, cosmopolitanism, and a future-oriented outlook on contemporary social events. This melding of temporal and spatial logistics with the practices of everyday speech is known as a chronotope and is a concept I will explore in more detail below. But given the importance of English in China today, it would be fair to consider English a quasi-official language with an extensive public mandate that runs throughout both the education system and society more broadly, affecting nearly every individual who dreams of a better future for themselves and their families.

And yet very few people, other than those educated abroad or in top domestic educational institutions, could be considered functionally fluent in English. Many people do work for international companies or regularly communicate with others outside China: academics write papers for international journals, entrepreneurs travel abroad, and interpreters translate for foreign tourists and businesspeople. But taken together, this handful of potential uses for English pales in comparison to the sheer number of students nationally and the all-encompassing inclusion of the language in structures of education, employment, and self-improvement. It is simply the case that most people in China will interact rarely, if at all, with a native speaker of English or use English as a lingua franca with non-Chinese in their lives. The vast majority of urban residents know English more as a utilitarian academic subject than as a vibrant spoken language, one that is tied to multiple-choice tests and educational credentials. Many people pepper their speech with English words and expressions, but these are often trendy and practiced tokens of global culture rather than spontaneous uses of natural fluency (see Q. Zhang 2012). Opportunities to actually use English conversationally outside of the highly charged testing environment of the education system are few and far between. For all of their growing sense of transnationalism, many Chinese I met in Shenyang remarked on how I was the first foreigner they had ever spoken to in person. Indeed, the most common venue where native-speaking English foreigners are encountered is the English language classroom itself.

This raises an important question related to the motivations and execution of this massive development project, but one also rarely considered by its architects, proponents, and agents: Why? Why teach an entire nation English? This question often unsettled my informants, friends, and teachers, who often countered by referring to ongoing economic and social transformations such as China joining the World Trade Organization or the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Their argument, in sum, was that the development of English in China is explained by global shifts in technology and capital, a growing integration of China within the transnational sphere where the lingua franca of business, trade, diplomacy, and science is English. China’s place in the world is changing, I was repeatedly told, and people are changing with it. Just as Deng Xiaoping’s proclamation that to get rich is glorious in the 1990s promised a new era of widespread wealth and prosperity, many people saw English as a key to unlocking their own, and the nation’s, future potential.

Economic imperatives undoubtedly play a role in this phenomenon, but they also act as a cloak, a convenient ideological frame that obscures deeper, and more salient, cultural forces at work. The economic answer especially plays into a particular neoliberal logic of foreign languages as commodified products, with speakers motivated in their acquisition by choice, opportunity, and social fulfillment (Heller 2010; Holborow 2015; Shin and Park 2016). Following Lisa Hoffman’s (2010) ethnography of discourses of human capital in China’s employment markets, we can see how foreign languages have similarly become an attribute of the self-enterprising individuals she dubs patriotic professionals. Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller see such processes as an inevitable consequence of late capitalism, writing that economic transformations on a global scale have encouraged us to construct language as a technical skill, decoupled from authenticity (2012, 10; see also Heller 2003; J. Park and Wee 2012; Rubdy and Tan 2008; Shin 2016). I will explore later in more detail how English has been integrated as a commodity within a growing marketplace for private language education, but my ethnography also underlines the ways in which English is both part of a larger national project and grounded in the particularities of Shenyang’s sociocultural milieu. In particular, I highlight how uncertainties about the roles and positions of individuals within China’s ongoing modernization drives both the consumers and purveyors of English language education. The massive uptake in English as an individualized skill has been accompanied by the public circulation of English as a token of a changing society, but one that is not equally available to all citizens. What many people termed the English fever (yingyu re) in Shenyang reflects a profound mixture of anxiety and yearning about skills and knowledge that Andrew Kipnis (2011) has dubbed educational desire, and an almost universal acceptance of the language as a measure of current success and future potential in a globalized world. Those desires are all the more intense given the historical primacy of the one-child policy and a family structure that invests all aspirations in a single child (V. Fong 2004, 2011; F. Liu 2015).

This leads me to consider how individuals (language teachers, students, parents, administrators, and so forth) both understand and configure their positions within the educational system and society more generally. By way of its association with global domains of culture and modern forms of life and livelihood, speaking English has become a transformative process in the lives of many Chinese, often tied to the cultivation of a network of linked practices indexing global modernity including the display of particular commodities and brands, music tastes, media consumption, lifestyle pursuits, and so forth. English is one such key signifier: to speak English in China today is, in a very real sense, to be a different kind of person from those who do not. The logic of this equivalence motivates a vast array of pedagogical and communicative practices that range from the conventional to the bizarre—Li Yang’s Crazy English program, for instance, obliges students to scream out their English lessons at the top of their lungs (J. Li 2009; Woodward 2008)—but all illustrate an overarching notion of what language means in this context. I therefore attribute the rationale for the mass adoption of English to what the linguist Braj Kachru (1986) termed the language’s alchemy, its power to cultivate the social value of individuals, reshape relations between differently situated actors and groups, and even propel the nation forward on its path to development.

The prominence of English in China today is the result of historical relations of colonialism and power that forged its global presence and the hierarchical ordering of linguistic inequality (Canagarajah 1999; Heller and McElhinny 2017). European languages have retained their dominance in many postcolonial societies, including India, the Philippines, the countries of Africa, and others, often to the detriment of minority languages in a process Robert Phillipson (1992, 2009) dubs linguistic imperialism. Christina Higgins (2009) argues that studies of global English have descended into a rigid dichotomization between creative and hegemonic perspectives on the language, with some praising its potential to liberate individuals from poverty or nationalism, while others decry its imposition by colonizers on their former subjects. The reality, she notes, is far more complex, involving a range of state policies, individual desires, and collective actions. Vicente Rafael reminds us, for instance, that imperial languages were never simply imposed from above by colonizers or language planners, but were in many ways embraced by revolutionaries, nationalists, and ordinary citizens. After independence, Filipino nationalists celebrated Castilian Spanish as a language that would allow them to communicate at a distance, traversing differences in language, social rank, and territorial boundaries. It would translate the local into the national, which would simultaneously resonate with the languages of the larger modern world (Rafael 2005, 13). The prominence of European languages in postcolonial nations reflects complicated desires and needs of individuals grappling with the contradictions of modernity and global capitalism.

To return to the contemporary Chinese context, I therefore argue that the nature of English language learning and the role the language plays in the contemporary educational, social, and political environments of Shenyang is a distinctly Chinese phenomenon, rooted in the concerns of people suddenly confronted with new forms of social, economic, and political stratification. The global apparatus of educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations, private corporations, and armies of transnational teachers and students has indeed shaped the nature of pedagogical practices, institutional forms, and even individual life courses on the ground in Shenyang. But similar to the ways in which socialism itself was a global project rooted specifically in the Chinese experience (Dirlik 2005), English in China is a nominally global language that is enacted and interpreted within an inherently local spatial framework. As Jan Blommaert (2010, 80) argues, Languages and discourses move around, but they do so between spaces that are full of rules, norms, customs and conventions, and they get adapted to the rules, norms, customs and conventions of such places. In other words, as languages travel across the globe, their values are reterritorialized, imported into local systems of meaningfulness (Zentz 2015). To understand why English is so popular—why it is so intensely desired—therefore requires an ethnographic perspective that is grounded in the intimate, everyday goals and activities of ordinary Chinese citizens, not the machinations of global corporations or institutions.

This perspective is significant because we have entered an age of intensified language change and shift: even as many smaller languages have become endangered, global languages (and their geographic metropoles) have been transformed through a process often dubbed superdiversity (Vertovec 2007; see also Blommaert 2013; Silverstein 2015). New patterns of migration, new desires and intentions of those migrants, and the communicative technologies that link diasporic and transnational communities together have created complex interconnected webs of language and culture (Cho 2012; Goebel 2010; Ong 1999). Whereas conventional sociolinguistic analyses assumed a shared framework for the interpretation of speech events—that conversational participants could use familiar linguistic features to recognize certain types of discursive events such as a dispute, wager, or joke—in superdiverse communities these frameworks may be only partially shared or even stand in opposition to each other. For instance, Jasmine, one of the teachers I worked with quite extensively, called me one day to ask a question about American immigration policies. As I explained to her several technical details in English, I switched into Mandarin to add some clarification. There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment and then Jasmine queried, Are you speaking Chinese to me because my English is not good? What I viewed solely as an issue of communicative clarity, she viewed as one of metapragmatic evaluation, a critique of her own communicative resources and language capabilities. Likewise, Chinese students in English language classes frequently had trouble differentiating their foreign teachers’ formal instruction from offhand comments or jokes. Foreign teachers often characterized their students as humorless automatons shaped by a strict educational system, but their jokes landed flat only because students had trouble keying sudden shifts into a casual stylistic tone. In superdiverse linguistic environments, therefore, the contextualization cues that allow participants to broadcast their intentions and interpret those of others may

Reviews for The Future Conditional

[Andrew Lyons · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An extraordinarily well written description of the social context of English language education and usage in NE China. Professor Henry deploys a battery of theoretical concepts from Bakhtin and contemporary scholars in anthropological linguistics (such as Susan Gal and Michael Silverstein on indexical order and metapragmatics) in order to detail the social situations where speakers may prefer or proscribe local dialect, Mandarin
or classroom English. The author’s style is marked by brevity and unusual clarity. In consequence this is a book that should be appreciated both by scholars and by students in linguistics courses.