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Original Article
Introduction
In an article published in English Today in 2005, Niu and Woolf contend that:
EFL is a modern day Trojan horse filled with EFL teachers/soldiers or missionaries, armed with English words rather than bullets, intent upon re-colonizing the world to remake it in the image of Western democracy. China has brought the Trojan Horse within its gates and the army of EFL teachers is hard at work Westernizing China.
The argument that English, and by extension the ELT industry, is a threat to local culture and society was first brought to public attention in China in 1995, when a group of graduate students in an elite university in Shanghai failed an important Chinese exam (Zhou, 2007). The blame for this failure was ascribed to both the intensive learning of English in college and a concomitant ignorance of Chinese studies; and the news that was generated by the incident sparked a great deal of reflection and critique about educational priorities in China. In the years since, there has been much debate about whether it is necessary for the Chinese to learn English and whether the English language will have negative effects on Chinese language and culture. For example, Xie Kechang, a professor at the Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, questioned the necessity for the entire nation to learn English during a speech at the National Committee of CPPCC (Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference) in 2004 (Cai, 2006). Other scholars have asserted that 'teaching in English and writing in English in China [has] resulted in a number of people who are not able to write acceptable Chinese' and that 'the internationalization of English is making Chinese a dialect' (Zhou, 2007: 85).
This discourse of English as a threat, known in Chinese as yingyu weixie lun ...å¨èf... [lit. 'English language threat discussion'] has become particularly marked following changes in a language policy which previously demonized English, as well as internationalization initiatives such as those surrounding the Beijing Olympics in 2008. As English has become more prominent in the country in the last ten years, so public controversy about its role has grown. Yet while assertions and evaluations of the sort quoted above have frequently been voiced by scholars...