As a result of China's growing participation and importance in the process of internationalization and globalization a continuously rising number of Chinese students has gone abroad for further study. By the end of the last decade the number of Chinese students abroad made up the largest group of international students in the USA (surpassing those from India) and during the next decade this group will become the world's largest floating student population. Because of its size and the growing recognition of China and Chinese culture around the world, research on a wide range of problem areas among Chinese students abroad has been initiated, especially in Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, the USA and Hong Kong. This article looks at the variety of research issues and attempts to provide a first overview in the light of international and comparative research on international students, their mobility and their recognition by host countries as well as their influence as cultural 'irritators'.

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The current system of higher education in China is in a remarkable stage of change: Following the decisison by the Chinese government in the middle of the 1990s to transform the elite system of higher education into a mass higher education system, based on a 15% participation rate of the 18-22 age group, the system is now facing a number of challenges due to its dramatic expansion and internal restruction. This comprises the phenomenon of growing regional imbalances, the contradiction between the increasing quantity of students and decreasing quality of training as a result of insufficient resources, the tension between marketization of university services and the provision of academic knowledge for individual intellectual development.

Not before the beginning of the 20th century -in the course of increasing confrontations with foreign countries -the nationalistic government and later the Chinese communists had tried to alphabetizate parts of the about 90 % illiterate rural population in different regions of China. Planning, realization and success of the most different programmes of alphabetization turned out to beuntil today -functions of the strained relations within regional and national politics concerning language, education and domestic policy. The analysis tries to work up under historical aspects this dynamic interdependence, to estimate the success of the attempts of alphabetization, basing on the census accomplished in July 1982, and to classify referring to the comparable international field of experience.Die chinesische Sprache kann als Zweig der sino-tibetischen Sprachenfamilie für sich in Anspruch nehmen, über das älteste, noch verwendete graphische System zu verfügen, dessen Anfänge 4000-5000 Jahre zurückliegen. Dieses als "Zeichenschrift" -im Gegensatz zur "Buchstabenschrift" -zu charakterisierende System hat sich aus einer anfänglichen protochinesischen Form, dem Piktogramm ("schematische Abbildung konkreter Gegenstände"), über das Ideogramm (abstrakte Abbildung konkreter Erscheinungen) zur heutigen Form des Phonoideogramms entwickelt, das ein Schriftzeichen als Komplex eines phonetischen Elements -zur Kennzeichnung der Aussprache -und eines ideographischen Elementszur inhaltlichen Bestimmung -erscheinen läßt (Hermanovä-Novotnä; Karlgren; Kratochvil; Ladstätter).Über wieviele derartige Schriftzeichen die chinesische Sprache derzeit verfügt, ist mit letzter Genauigkeit nicht zu klären: Die bis heute erstellten Wörterbücher enthalten maximal zwischen 50000 und 60000 Zeichen (Hermanovä-Novotnä 1974, Sp. 1186, die seit 1978 in den fünfjährigen Grundschulen verwendeten Lehrbücher der chinesischen Sprache vermitteln etwa 3100 Schriftzeichen. Soweit es den gegenwärtigen sprachlichen Alltag betrifft, haben Häufigkeitsanalysen in ordnungspolitisch so differenten Gesellschaftssystemen wie der VR China und Singapur jedoch ergeben, daß je nach Objektbereich und Schwierigkeitsgrad des Basistextes BuE 36 (1983) 3 295