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In her chapter, Linda Tsung draws on her fieldwork in primary schools in southern Xinjiang, and asks the question of what happens to educational outcomes when English is introduced into a bilingual curriculum in the XUAR. She concludes that due to poor teaching materials, inadequate teacher training, and limited resources, Uyghur students struggle to keep up with their Han peers in this sort of trilingual environment, and the end result is poor academic achievement, and increased disparity between Uyghur and Han students. This situation is further exasperated by the gap between urban and rural schools, with urban schools and students better equipped for bilingual and trilingual education, while rural Uyghur students fall further and further behind. Finally, in her opinion, the government-backed merge of schools in Xinjiang has largely failed to address these inequalities, with significant barriers remaining in place (linguistic, cultural and institutional), which prevent any meaningful interaction either inside the classroom or on the playgrounds

In this chapter, Ma Rong provides a detailed and nuanced overview of bilingual education in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Charting the historical development of bilingualism in TAR since 1952, Ma analyzes various models for balancing Putonghua and Tibet language instruction, highlighting the differences of opinion among state officials and Tibetan families over the relative value of both languages, and the best methods for increasing enrolment, promoting high quality educational outcomes, and improving life chances. He is critical of the current trend that does not require Han students in the TAR to study the Tibetan language and culture, and stresses the importance of adapting the model of bilingual education to local conditions. In the end, however, he stresses the centrality of Putonghua for Tibet, and contends that “if a group does not learn the language of mainstream society, especially for the groups relatively less developed in industrialization due to historical reasons, it will be impossible for the members of this group to participate in national education, economy, and social development. In most cases, these groups will be marginalized in all aspects and then ethnic conflicts will be inevitable.”

In her chapter, Zhao Zhenzhou examines a group of ethnically Mongolian university students who are studying outside their autonomous region following their graduation from an experimental trilingual class in middle school. She demonstrates how neo-liberal market reforms in China are slowly squeezing out minority languages, like Mongolian, which are increasingly undervalued within the Chinese linguistic marketplace. The emphasis placed on English by the state and its schools intensifies this problem, as minority students are now required to master three languages to achieve success in the state educational system, and often feel like they cannot keep up. Despite some sense of “imagined empowerment.” Zhao argues that the state has distorted the linguistic marketplace in China by attaching greater symbolic importance to English, despite its still-limited role in Chinese society. She calls for a “diversification of international language learning in China,” which would allow minority languages to be viewed as an asset in today’s increasingly globalized world.

China is home to over one million ethnic Koreans who have long thought of themselves as part of the Chinese nation, making significant contributions to the nation’s development. Due to their high educational outcomes, Koreans are often viewed as a “model minority” in China, a cultural stereotype that can carry a weighty burden. Arguing in her chapter that multicultural education requires protective and discursive spaces for minority languages, Gao Fang demonstrates that for ethnic Korean teachers, at least, the pressure to succeed and live up to the model minority tag has led to a gradual hollowing out of Korean-Chinese identity. In place of the Korean language, which is increasingly devalued, commodified cultural practices like kimchi and karaoke have come to define the boundaries of Korean identity in China. Gao’s chapter also highlights the nested yet fluid hierarchy of minzu categories and identities in the PRC, with several of her Korean informants viewing themselves as innately superior to Tibetan and Uyghurs students but still inferior to the Han majority.

In her chapter, Zhang Li-fang asks what intellectual styles are the most conducive for good educational outcomes in a multi-ethnic environment like China. She argues that intellectual styles complicate multicultural education, and stresses the importance of balancing group preferences for learning with individual cognitive styles. Furthermore, rapidly developing multiethnic societies like China, must navigate the desire to cultivate “the adaptive values of Type I styles,” which are more propitious to the “creativity-generating” activities of the global economy, with the more conservative style exhibited by some Chinese minorities like Tibetan and Uyghur students. This is made all the more difficult by the PRC’s unique ethnic policies, and the inflexibility they offer at the curriculum level, and, one might add, the institutional scale.