Minglang Zhou Bücher

Exploring contemporary China's language ideology, this text delves into its role in positioning the nation as a global power. It analyzes the promotion of Putonghua both domestically and internationally, linking this linguistic strategy to China's economic and military advancements. Utilizing PRC policy documents and fieldwork, the book examines the institutional development of language order and its implications for China's domestic policies and global influence, revealing a cohesive relationship between language and national strategy since the early 2000s.

Minglang Zhou's highly erudite and well-researched volume on the policies concerning writing reforms for China's minorities since 1949 provides an original and well-reasoned summary of a complex process. It documents how different script reforms meet dramatically different fates according to local preferences, history, cross-border ties, and the vitality of previously-used scripts. It convincingly shows that no single variable is decisive in the success of a script, and that language planners' fixation with technical details is doomed to failure, without careful coordination of extra-code factors. It also documents the little-known Sino-Soviet cooperation in the area of writing reforms. In a style accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Zhou's book is of interest to language planners, sinologists, applied linguists, writing theorists, and ethnologists.