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Preface
The research idea for this book first came to me while working as a foundation lecturer for a university Chinese-language program in Western Australia. During that time, I witnessed how a department and a discipline struggled to exist and how the boundary and knowledge of a field of study can be conditioned by values, budgets, and power. There were also forces that existed beyond the university campus that influenced how I was to design and develop the curriculum for students of Chinese. As a newcomer to university teaching, the social interaction in academe and the subsequent educational implications fascinated me. I began to question how and why China was to be learned in a Western country, such as Australia, and the forces that influence the sphere of a discipline in a university and why they exist. I hope postgraduate students who wish to undertake research in language education (i.e., in doing similar research on the “the study of China” in other countries, the analysis of other language disciplines’ sociological evolution, or the sociological development of any intellectual field in a university) will find this book useful.