Critical stances towards English Medium Instruction (EMI), and to a lesser extent the similar use of French, Portuguese and Spanish Medium Instruction in former colonies of European states, have been growing since ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This discussion contextualises ‘Southern’ critiques of EMI within early decolonial debates, ‘southern multilingualisms’ and ‘transknowledging’ (reciprocal translation and exchange of knowledge), which are often invisibilised in EMI. This is illustrated through critiques in two former British territories: the first, with critiques that circulated in Southern Africa from the 1960s; the second, with critiques that surfaced four decades later in Australia. Whereas EMI is readily recognised in South Africa (with 8 per cent L1 English speakers), Australia (with 250 Aboriginal linguistic communities at colonisation and 250 years of in-migration from all continents) is an EMI context for 23–30 per cent of citizens. Aggressive marketing of Australia as an educational destination for students from the Asia-Pacific amplifies its multilingual and EMI reality in higher education. The critique of EMI includes a history of cognitive capture, debt-trap diplomacy and educational failure. Included are key agents that advance EMI, invisibilise multilingualisms and perpetuate coloniality despite the claims of social justice and access that accompany EMI rationales.

This book’s macroeconomic analysis suggests Chinese ?nancing could o?er nations a development opportunity by exploiting Western ?nance’s Achilles's heel: the maturity mismatch between the capital market’s short-term ?nancing and debtor nations’ long-term development goals. Chinese policy banks have the capacity to ?nance big-ticket public infrastructure projects over a long-term horizon. However, Chinese capital also has its drawbacks given its tendency to secure its lending with microeconomic ties or commercial conditions embedded in its loan contracts.Popular attention has also focused on the question of whether Chinese lending is a form of "debt-trap" diplomacy used as a coercive economic tool to acquire long-run strategic assets. Rather than debt-trap diplomacy, however, this book argues, China’s tendency to invest in maximizing long-run markets rather than short-run profits has at times ensnarled its policy banks in creditor traps where they must lend defensively to recover their initial investments. Chapter 8 also examines how these creditor-debtor relationships have changed over time and how they are likely to continue to evolve in a post-coronavirus world.