The complexity and diversity of the linguistic situations, practices, policies and theories of bilingual education is widely acknowledged in a country with a population of 1.3 billion people consisting of 56 officially recognised indigenous nationalities speaking more than 80 languages. This book addresses this complexity and diversity with a comprehensive examination of issues in bilingual education for both minority and majority nationalities in China and explores the links between the two major forms of bilingual education. It includes voices that are ‘emic’ or ‘etic’, local or international, and voices that come from those who work at the forefront of bilingual education or in the development of theory. All these voices are needed as different and divergent perspectives represent a reality

Anwei Feng lectures and supervises education doctoral students at Durham University mainly in the areas of bilingualism, bilingual education and intercultural studies. He has researched the experience of minority students studying the second and third language in universities in China and the experience of students from Confucian Heritage Cultures on UK campuses. His latest publications include the article ‘An evaluative analysis of parallel conceptions of bilingualism in China’ in IJBEB in 2005 and the book ‘Living and Studying Abroad’ (co-edited with M. Byram, 2006).