Global China in the language classroom: Discursive constructions of culture and ideology in Chinese as a foreign language textbooks

As China’s global presence expands, Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education has become an important site for the international circulation of cultural narratives about contemporary China. Despite the rapid growth of CFL programs, limited research has critically examined how Chinese culture is represented in widely used instructional materials. Addressing this gap, the present study analyzes cultural representations in two widely used CFL textbook series in international university programs. The dataset comprises four core textbook volumes (two per series) designed for beginner and intermediate learners. Guided by a critical discourse analytic perspective and informed by Moran and Lu's cultural dimensions framework, the study combines systematic content analysis with discourse-oriented interpretation to examine how cultural references are distributed across the curriculum. The analysis shows that the textbooks predominantly emphasize visible cultural elements such as social groups, everyday practices, and symbols of modernization, while giving comparatively limited attention to internal diversity and deeper sociocultural perspectives. These patterns suggest that CFL textbooks construct a pedagogical discourse presenting China as socially cohesive, economically modern, and globally integrated.