Goldberg and Noels (2006) argued that learners may gain a new perception or understanding of themselves, or, of people who speak that language, in the process of acquiring the language, and thus come to identify with that particular language community (Liu, Zhang, & May, 2022). This resulted in some cautious responses and stances toward cultural globalization, particularly the dominance of some hegemonic languages (chiefly, English). These concerns and attitudes may be reflected in educational and language policies as well as in English language textbooks in some countries, and China is a particularly interesting case in point (see also Liu, Zhang, Yang, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2022). That said, Blommaert (2010) also asserted that these "hegemonic" languages "have not only become 'global' but also indigenized, both adapted to new communicative habits and subjected to local norms" (p. xi). Curdt-Christiansen and Weninger (2015: 4) observed that these localized trends are particularly evident in school textbooks, and they argued that textbooks, sanctioned in most cases by government bodies, represent the "official" texts that "often have an overt or covert agenda to promote/demote certain cultural values and ideologies".
China's response to the challenge of cultural globalization in terms of English language education remains cautious, due to the fact that China has harboured an unstable attitude towards the learning and teaching of the English language over a long period of its history. It is understood that learning English in China exposes learners to various media, foreign cultural information, different values and life views, which may differ from the cognitive, affective and social implications conveyed through their first language and within the wider society (Lo Bianco 2009). In this sense, every choice in writing or compiling an English language textbook may reflect this caution.
China has had an ambivalent policy for the learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) over much of its history. The status and role of English has thus changed over time, depending on the political period. This explicit and implicit implementation of language policy has had a particular impact not only on the content of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks in China, but also on the politics and ideologies underlying them. However, studies exploring such politics and ideologies remain sensitive areas in which little work has been done to date. By applying a combination of critical discourse analysis and a corpus linguistics approach, in this paper we critically investigate the political and ideological underpinnings embedded in 10 current English language textbook series that are widely used and officially approved for use in most Chinese universities by the Ministry of Education, the central body for designing, overseeing and monitoring curriculum design textbook production. As we will report in more detail the findings in our presentation, we can briefly observe that, unlike earlier historical periods, no explicit political philosophy is captured in any of the textbook series, which reflects China's more recent focus on wider economic engagement and the processes of globalization.
