In late December 2023, Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training announced that, while English would remain a compulsory second language in most schools, it would be removed as a mandatory subject in the national high school exams in 2025. The move was largely applauded. These exams are a make-or-break opportunity for Vietnamese youth to enter higher education institutions; removing English as a mandatory subject was seen as a way to ensure that the urban–rural gap in access to English language education didn’t tilt the playing field further in favour of Vietnamese urbanites.
Less welcome was another decision from the same ministry, publicised a few weeks later: the official introduction of national Mandarin language textbooks for eight- and nine-year-old pupils. Online critics opposed the move, characterising it as a “top-down effort to remove English and replace it with Chinese”. The thin-skinned ministry reportedly referred many of these detractors to the authorities on grounds of disseminating online disinformation, but these expressions of unhappiness point to long-standing sensitivities about Chinese influence and language—sensitivities that had a direct impact on the way the Vietnamese read and write today.
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- Tags: Issue 38, Thiện Việt, Vietnam