Introduction

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a multilingual country with an overall population of 1.3 billion people and 56 ethnic groups. Multilingual policy is deeply rooted in China’s historical legacy and power struggles. This chapter sketches the long history of China’s multilingual language policy from the Qin Dynasty to modern China, with a focus on the bilingual education for minorities since 1949. Adopting Spolsky’s theory of language policy, this chapter further builds the ecological framework for the study of language policy on the Yi.