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.
One issue is, I’m ethnically Chinese, but been living in the US for more than 35 years (in my 40s), that when I try to speak my limited Chinese, I sound like a child. So to a person from China, I’m an adult Chinese person sounding like a kid, so it may look like I’m some type of a mentally challenged person. So it can be very difficult. And then if they found out I can speak English, they’ll be like “just f-ing speak English” and get it over with already. Of course it depends on the situation and person. But that’s the general difficulties of being Asian American in Asia (who is trying hard to blend in).
For non-Asians in Asia, they all say “everyone is so nice and patient with me”, and that’s because they are obviously a foreigner and its still a novelty for someone in China to be able to interact with a foreigner (maybe not in big 1st tier cities), so they will give you the time of the day.