ABSTRACT
The Chinglish signs in the linguistic landscape have long been a target of crackdown campaigns by Chinese city authorities to prevent city images from being tarnished. In recent years, however, some New Chinglish expressions created by young Chinese people have emerged and quickly became viral online. Quite unexpectedly, the state media have chosen to glorify them and lauded the Westerners’ attention to them as a demonstration of the global influence of Chinese culture. Theoretically underpinned by Teun van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ in discourse, this chapter shows that Chinglish on public signs is represented in the state news reports as ideological Other/Them, whose negative aspects are emphasized, while the New Chinglish is represented as ideological Us, whose positive aspects are highlighted. The seemingly ambivalent subjective attitudes towards Chinglish reveal the evolving language politics in China and the tensions between language standardization on the one hand and the positioning of China in the international world through local language and culture on the other.
