“Does Chinese philosophy count as philosophy?”: decolonial awareness and practices in international English medium instruction programs

This qualitative study integrates key theories on epistemic decolonization from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to investigate the decolonial awareness and curriculum practices of teachers and international students in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) program on Chinese philosophy and culture at a top-rated university in China. Content analysis of the in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 17 informants reveals that the teachers and students all demonstrated varying degrees of decolonial awareness related to the marginalized status of Chinese philosophy in Anglo–-Eurocentric disciplinary systems and adopted the following strategies to decolonialize the curriculum and foster epistemic justice in the unequal geopolitics associated with knowledge production: (1) historicizing Chinese philosophy as a modern discipline that has emerged from inter-knowledge dialogues across philosophical traditions and is still in constant tension with the complex interplay of the semi-colonial, imperial, and Cold War legacies; (2) abandoning the Anglo-Eurocentric benchmark by pluralizing the disciplinary contemporaneity, and (3) cultivating epistemic trust in Chinese through intercultural translation. Moreover, the flexible shuttling between Chinese and English in EMI classrooms and tutorial sessions helped the informants to observe the decolonial awareness that was inherent in their understanding of the discipline-specific ontology. The findings suggest the agentive potential of teachers and international students to foster epistemic justice in EMI curriculum design and implementation that counters the hegemony of English as a colonial force. Finally, implications for decoloniality-informed EMI policymaking and curriculum internationalization are discussed.