The fundamental changes in Chinese policies touching on non-common foreign language (NCFL) education offered a distinctive chance to illustrate multilingual problematisations of the policy that consider foreign language education. Unpacking the evolution of policy intentions through the four chronological policy modes, this study elucidates and sheds light on how the policies attempt to address national-to-individual NCFL-learning-supported necessities. Policy intention to coping with the concomitant challenges and opportunities has gradually shifted into Mode 4 (the education-enhanced mode, since 2018), proposing requirements for continually and comprehensively improve NCFL education – not just reflecting on expanding NCFL-learning group but also on enhancing its quality and supplementing what is missed in prior policy but important for NCFL education development. Meanwhile, contemporary language policies appear to invest more efforts for promoting the education of NCFLs that are official languages of the B&R designated partner countries, considering their role in serving the B&R initiative for China's educational, political, and economic development, as well as satisfying personal NCFL learning needs.
The present study offers a systematic and historical overview and analysis of the NCFL-related Chinese policy, addressing the literature gap. At the same time, this study contributes to understanding towards the way of using Comparative Institutional Analysis (CIA) as an analytical framework to investigate language policies and/or language education by establishing the modes to characterise the institutions – on the basis of accounting for social goals, rules and actors in a specific social context. Also, unpacking the historical transitions towards NCFL development in China through the CIA framework may assist other policymakers in (re)considering and (re)positioning the role of NCFL education in other nations. Meanwhile, this study can also help the social agents at the meso-level including local policymakers and school administrators in China grasp the policy intention, and thus they can evaluate whether the local practice lines up with it, as well as how they can appropriate the policies based on the understanding of policy requirements and investigation of the local situation for assisting teachers in putting a top-down education plan on the ground for students' NCFL learning.
Under a top-down process across multiple layers in the Chinese highly centralised education system, even though it seems like the individual agency at the macro level with robust control on the enactment of language policy, the institutional agency at meso and micro levels may adopt the policies in a contradictory way. This means that the policy intention might be reshaped in the implementation progress given social actors' interpretations, practical needs, personal values, and other related factors (e.g., social status and education level). Thus, while the transformation towards NCFL education-enhanced policy mode, considering that what is done at a lower level is frequently not the same as what is required at a higher level, more attention is needed to investigate how local education authorities and school administrators (meso-level), and teachers (micro-level) react to policy goals and rules.
