With the increasing demand of Chinese language learning, the Hanban has been dispatching volunteer Chinese teachers worldwide for several years. Many studies on volunteer Chinese teaching have focused on the Hanban’s soft power projection, higher education cooperation, and policies. However, not much work has been done on the nature of official launched volunteer Chinese teaching via examining its teaching practices. Mainly referring to Phillipson’s theory of linguistic imperialism, my thesis aims to fill in the gap in the literature through exploring whether volunteer Chinese teaching launched by the Hanban in three Southeast Asian countries has features of linguistic imperialism. I conducted a qualitative case study on teaching practices of volunteer teachers in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia for the purpose of having a detailed understanding of the volunteer Chinese teaching situations. Combining with findings from interviews of volunteer Chinese teachers, the paper also contains a content analysis on materials from the Hanban website and online newspapers. My analysis indicates that volunteer Chinese teaching in the three Southeast Asian countries contains some features of linguistic imperialism, but cannot be completely defined as linguistic imperialism. The result on the nature of volunteer Chinese teaching clarifies some people’s concern about the promotion of Chinese language by China. Also, Chinese language teachers and administrators can have a better idea of what Chinese teaching should be like and how it could be improved.
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