Abstract
Abstract
In this entry of the scholarship and practices in multilingualism in education in mainland China since the founding of the PRC, we focus our analysis on policies, models, and challenges that policymakers, researchers, and practitioners have to face in what we call the
period of multilingualism in education
in which multilingualism and multilingual education are most active. This entry suggests that, while the promotion of Mandarin Chinese has remained most consistent for the PRC era and is further intensified in the whole society in recent years, policies and practices concerning minority languages, varieties of Chinese (
Fangyan
), and foreign languages have fluctuated, particularly in education. In the current post‐COVID context where tensions deepen between diversity and uniformity conceptions for language education and for the society at large, how far the pendulum that shows an overall balance of the two in this period is swinging toward the latter remains to be seen.