This book contains much hard-to-obtain information about bilingual education among China's 55 minority groups – eight per cent of the population. Recent fieldwork and Chinese sources underlie this detailed discussion. The broad range of topics ranges from experimental preschools through options to take the secondary or university entrance exams entirely in the Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean, Uyghur or Zhuang languages (except for a Chinese section). New universities offer four year degrees in science or engineering, taught entirely in Mongolian, Tibetan or Korean. Even so, many parents prefer Chinese-language schools. A survey of Hui students, Chinese Moslems who are historically Chinese-speaking, finds that they have higher self-esteem than their fluently bilingual Uyghur and Mongolian classmates.

The book's main focus concerns how to balance minority language education in primary school with building up the students' Chinese. English classes are hard to squeeze in, yet vital for further education and jobs. School fees can cost a year's income. Many families choose free temple schools instead, uncontroversial in Yunnan, but risking surveillance in Xinjiang or Tibet. State school teachers are often poorly trained, speak the minority language poorly or have inadequate Chinese. Teachers must often do janitorial and grounds work, or even supervise rural labourers, to earn minuscule salaries. Minority textbooks are scarce. Most translate Chinese texts without local content. Dai children in the tropics read primers about playing in the snow. One chapter discusses prejudice against mainland brides of Taiwanese farmers. The women speak a more fluent Mandarin that is stigmatized as “communist.” We do not know how many brides grew up in Southern Fujian, also speaking “Taiwanese” or Hakka. The final chapter examines China's rankings on language rights according to international law and UN treaties.

The editors' thesis is that Beijing's policy is forced assimilation, “linguistic genocide.” This stance is perverse, opposite to Beijing's actual policy. Beijing, like India and the USSR, has funded one of the largest bilingual education and language maintenance programmes in history. The book's school of education mind-set reflects a policy-based determinism, all but unilluminated by history, anthropology, political science or international comparisons. Readers may wonder if the editors know what an assimilation policy looks like. The tsars forced Russification from Finland to Poland. Turkey banned Kurdish names, songs and language until 1991. Meiji Japan borrowed the US Bureau of Indian Affairs goal of exterminating indigenous languages as Japan developed its monolingual Japanese national language kokugo. In colonial Korea and Taiwan, Japan banned local-language names, schools and media. Ainu remained unrecognized till 1997. China's Nationalist government followed the Japanese and US models. The Mandarin national language guoyu was designed in the 1920s to replace both Chinese dialects and minority languages. After 1949 the Nationalist government on Taiwan banned Taiwanese and Hakka as well as aborigine languages until 1987, punishing children and firing workers for not speaking Mandarin. In Hong Kong, English was the only language of law until 1987. State-funded primary schools did not exist until 1971; teaching was in English, not Chinese.

In this context, China's decision to grant equal constitutional status to minority peoples, cultures and languages was a breakthrough. Beijing rejected the “national language” model, with its goal of eliminating dialects and minority languages. Mandarin putonghua is designed as a common second language, a lingua franca. Of course policy does not always match local practice. “Han chauvinism” (da Han zhuyi) remains common and destructive. But policy rejects any ethnic Han national model, attempting, rather, to spread a supra-ethnic identity as “citizens of China” (Zhonghua minzu). Yet the editors of this volume consistently refer to Hanyu, “the ethnic Han language” rather than to “Mandarin” or “putonghua.”

Flaws abound in how China defined minority groups, and in its attempts to support culture while suppressing religion. Yet Beijing's focus, if anything, centres excessively on language. The book often assumes that nearly every minority citizen speaks an ancestral language. Yet many have been monolingual in Chinese for decades, if not centuries, including many Zhuang and Manchus. The Dalai Lama himself grew up in a Mandarin speaking family in northern Sichuan, and learned Tibetan only as an adolescent. Even in a world without bigotry, overwhelming demographics would restrict what the Africanist Louis-Jean Calvet calls “speakers of peripheral languages” in nations with a “super-central language” (Towards an Ecology of World Languages, Polity Press, 2006.)

This book emphasizes raw statistics. The editors did not catch many inaccuracies. Beijing does not plan to replace characters with pinyin. The Tibetan language is not linguistically closer to English than to Chinese. China is not a Southeast Asian country. Most Korean Chinese are not “recent immigrants.” Some Chinese authors are cited by their given names. Maps, a timeline, and charts of ethnic groups and language families would have been helpful. Photos of writing systems, teachers and students would have been most welcome, along with more quotations from local people.