>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]
Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.
>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]
Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/01/china-humiliat...