The "Loong" Story: A Decolonial Thinking of Language Policy and Planning in People's Republic of China

Abstract

The word “Loong” had been widely used by the state media of the People’s Republic of China in 2024 to replace “Dragon” when referring to the mythological creature that considered to represent the spirit of China in English reports. However, “Loong” is a term connected with the country’s colonial history and is not a standard romanised spelling in the current language used in China. This recent linguistic phenomenon calls for a decolonial lens to investigate the two intertwined concepts, language and culture in China.

This thesis aims at evaluating the current language policy and planning as part of the cultural policy framework in China from a decolonial perspective. As a qualitative single case study with critical discourse analysis, the research focuses on the language standardisation and language ideology in post-1949 China, and their impacts on the intercultural communication strategies of the Chinese government. The theoretical framework and research methodology have created a continuum that places the language policy and planning in the decolonial social and cultural context.

The results indicate an internal colonialism shaped by the language standardisation from a Han-centric cultural perspective in China. Among the three instruments of the Chinese language policy and planning, Chinese Phonetic Alphabet functions as an intermediary between the rest two instruments simplified Chinese character and Putonghua, which is useful in a sense of language learning to increase the literacy rate. It also enables the ideographic Chinese language to form a globalised dialogue in the discourse of modernity, which is still dominated by European languages following the romanised spelling system. However, its function of decolonising the external colonialism in the cosmopolitan modernisation has been built on the Han-centric internal colonialism from the Chinese socialist ideology work lead by CCP, an identity work of defining “Chinese”. Further research on this Han-centric internal colonialism needs to be carried out in the future.