In Aspiring to be global, Shuang Gao reports on fieldwork in Yangshuo, which is in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China, and has been famous for its beautiful natural scenery and ethnolinguistic diversity. Despite its remote geolocation, West Street, a tourist neighborhood in Yangshuo, has been known as a ‘global village’ boasting of an authentic English-learning environment and hosting numerous English people. Intrigued by such questions as how such a rural place turned into a ‘global village’, and what are the social changes arising from this globalization process, Gao attempts to ‘examine the dynamics between language and social change’ in West Street. The book provides readers with a telling case that explicates ‘the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in China's globalization process’.

To unveil the semiotic construction of globality in West Street, Gao collects data from multiple sources, including tourist literature, policy documents, ethnographic interviews, and observations. Based on the data, she identifies various symbolic resources mobilized. The large inflow of foreigners and the appearance of cafes undoubtedly contribute to the globality. Meanwhile, the presence of foreigners also represents a linguistic semiotic opportunity. Historically, due to China's peripheral position in the globalized world of the twentieth century, English was a resource only available to well-educated people. Learning English meant learning communism. Such ideologies started to change from 1990s when China gradually moves from the periphery to the center of the world system, economically, politically, and culturally. English has featured great importance ‘for upward mobility in education and work’ and become an indicator of prestige and one's social status. It is with this indexicality of English, Gao argues, that West Street strategically mobilizes English as a mobile resource in branding its globality to attract domestic Chinese tourists, who are mostly middle-lower level professionals aspiring to improve their language competencies. Today, there are more than thirty language schools and over 6,000 language learners attracted annually to Yangshuo, making it the biggest English corner in China. Such a ‘stampede’ to English embodies the great appeal of globalization and is part of China's entrance to the global order.

The author finds that while aspiring to be global, Yangshuo confronts different types of ‘complexities and tensions’. For instance, the over-commercialization of West Street with noisy bars and nightclubs forces several relocations and closures of shops and pushes away foreigners preferring relaxing places. Besides the spatial and demographic reconfiguration, Gao also identified the interactional tension between language learners and foreigners. Language tourists in West Street wish to improve their language skills at affordable prices or even for free by talking to random foreigners on the street to exploit free linguistic capital. Such practice unsurprisingly creates tensions because foreigners refuse to be exploited and are fed up with tourists’ broken English and repetitive conversation topics. These complexities represent localized realities of vernacular globalization that is different from unified globalization processes in metropolitans. The book contributes to a better ‘understanding of sociolinguistics of globalization’ and would be of interest to sociolinguists and researchers working on globalization and tourism.