Abstract

608 BOOK REVIEWS by Shuang Gao, Bristol, UK, Multilingual Matters, 2019, 184 pp., $84.47 (hardback), ISBN 13: 978-1788922753 Shuang Gao’s book Aspiring to be Global: Language and Social Change in a Tourism Village in China (2019), makes for excellent reading. The book examines how a non-local resource – in this case, English language fluency connected to tourists’ mobility – constructs West Street as a ‘global village’.Itdiffers from present language studies, which focus on the commodifica- tion of local language as the result of the globalization. The case presents West Street, a busy neighborhood street on the west bank of Yangshuo County, located in the southeast of Guilin City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. West Street was renamed ‘East Wind Street’ because ‘West’ was regarded as politically incorrect by the central government in China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It was then changed to ‘Foreign Street’ in 1978, then to the current ‘global village’ or ‘English corner’ wherein Western elements, the English language in particular, play a major role. There- fore, it has experienced a variety of social (and linguistic) changes through the involvement of multi-level governance. This book helps readers understand that becoming a ‘global village’ is not a