“Mandarin Fever” and Chinese Language-learning in Brunei’s Middle Schools: Discrepant Discourses, Multifaceted Realities and Institutional Barriers

Abstract

China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse has led to a surge in Chinese language-learning worldwide, including in Southeast Asia. This article examines how this phenomenon has unfolded in Brunei, a Muslim and English–Malay bilingual majority country. Drawing on participant observations at two private Chinese middle schools, 19 interviews with teachers and parents, and 10 focus group discussions with students conducted in 2018, we find that there are discrepant discourses and multifaceted realities within and between different groups. While parents and teachers articulate the economic and cultural benefits of learning Chinese, students struggle to understand these and instead articulate banal motivations (e.g. being able to communicate with non-English-conversant family members and foreigners). Contextualising our findings to the historic marginalisation of the ethnic Chinese diasporic minority community in Brunei, we argue that the cumulative effects of educational and non-educational institutional barriers (e.g. lack of teaching materials relevant to the local context, and reliance on foreign teachers) hamper the development of effective and comprehensive Chinese language-learning in Brunei. Our findings suggest that, to date, the rise of China has had limited impact on Chinese language-learning among Chinese students and their parents in Brunei.

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