Timetable Summer 2022

Tuesday 7th June:

“Bilingual Plus” at Shanghai-based industrial park: from evolution to involution

Eleanor Yue Gong, UCL Institute of Education 

By examining the practices and effects of the discourses of and on the “bilingual plus” event in a Shanghai-based modern industrial park, this paper focuses on how the evolving professional selves are imagined and produced in global workplaces by the promise of “the more languages, the better”, while engendering the involution and inequality issues in contemporary Chinese labour market. The “bilingual plus”, advocating employees to learn and master more than English and Mandarin language, is not only strategised as a language policy to manage, regulate, and discipline workers and working space to survive in the post-pandemic globalising trends, but also conceptualised as an ideological construct that has figured in the emergence of competing discourses in China of nationalism and internationalism. Based on the ethnographic data through observations, interviews and fieldnotes collected in three typical multinational companies in the target industrial park, this article provides in-depth insights into office workers’ lived experience, linguistic practices, and understandings of “bilingual plus” and how the language policy is organised, described, and represented. It argues that the “bilingual plus” policy aims at naturalising socio-economic positions and workforce stratification in specific political economic conditions, rather than facilitating linguistic and cultural diversity.

Key words:
Bilingual plus, language policy, evolution, involution, nationalism, globalisation