Law, Social Justice & Global Development Resisting Linguistic Imperialism: a Response to the ‘Chinese Dream’

China, one of the world’s oldest civilisations and now routinely cited as the world’s second largest economy, has declared its ambition to rejuvenate and prosper under the government of President Xi Jinping. Since the slogan 'Chinese Dream' was promulgated in 2012, Chinese scholars have been made aware of a new impetus in the promotion of Chinese language and culture. However, globalisation has evidently generated (or played a role in generating) the spread of English as global Lingua Franca (particularly for culture, business and academic research), and this too has exerted a significant impact on China's national policies. This research paper sets out to investigate the reactions of Chinese scholars to the tensions created by these two 'forces', particularly as registered in the classroom discourse of university-level teaching in English. The paper's central subject is the problem of imperialism through culture – in this case, the cultural orientation (to knowledge and development) embedded, expressed and communicated by language. My findings are concerned with what is promulgated and what is resisted in terms of Westernisation and the phenomenon of 'linguistic imperialism'. Through a scrutiny of a pedagogic context, the paper identifies a critical tension in China, central to the Chinese Dream, along the simultaneous rise of English and the return of Chinese history, philosophy and literature.