World Englishes, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 409–427, 2011. 0883-2919 Chinese white-collar workers and multilingual creativity in the diaspora XIAOYE YOU ∗ ABSTRACT: The nearly universal requirement of English study in colleges has afforded the language an unprecedented institutional status and given rise to an increasingly large English-literate public in the Expanding Circle countries. Adopting the lens of domestic diaspora, the present study explores Chinese white-collar workers’ multilingual creativity when they seek to represent themselves as a distinct social form and to articulate their diasporic consciousness on an electronic bulletin board. Using thematic and rhetorical analysis, the study reveals not only patterns of social and personal behaviors of the new Chinese workforce but also the symbolic strategies that they develop to achieve agency. Rather than confining themselves to bilingual resources, white-collar workers actively utilize resources from multiple languages (such as Standard English, Standard Mandarin, Chinese regional dialects, and Internet language), and the multimodal functions of the digital technologies. Their idiosyncratic, fluid use of English defies the time-honored scholarly view of China English as a discrete formal linguistic system. INTRODUCTION Bilingual creativity is a prominent issue in world Englishes. Its discussion so far has been centered on contact literature in the Inner and Outer Circle countries. Numerous studies, notably Kachru (1989), Kachru (1990; 1992; 2005), Baker (2001), Thumboo (2006), Ashcroft (2009) and Butt (2009), fix their attention on writers from African countries, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and the West Indies. In the Expanding Circle countries where English does not claim an institutional status, literary creativity is marginally recognized, as exemplified by the works of Lin Yutang and Ha Jin from China (Bolton 2002; Zhang 2002). Instead, the most noted bilingual creations in these countries take place at the lexical level. Individuals borrow or invent English expressions to capture their unique experiences, feelings, and thoughts (Kang 1999; Stanlaw 2004; Dimova 2007). Creativity in pragmatic strategies, discursive patterns, and speech acts has also attracted scholarly attention. For example, Kirkpatrick (1991; 1993), Kirkpatrick and Xu (2002), and You (2008; 2010) have noted the wide variety of discourse strategies that Chinese-English bilinguals use in the contexts of letter writing, school essay writing, and online communication. Lee (2004), Stanlaw (2004) and Moody (2006) also highlight the inventiveness of Japanese and Korean artists when they compose song lyrics in English to convey their feelings and metropolitan sentiments. As bilingual creativity most frequently occurs in multilingual societies where English enjoys an institutional status, the fast changing English profile in some Expanding Cir- cle countries heralds greater bilingual creativity. Over the last three decades, economic globalization has encouraged nations such as China, Egypt, Korea, Mexico, Iran, Russia, and Turkey to champion a mass higher education and to increase their college enrollment (Arslan 2002; Kim and Lee 2006; You 2010). Most of their college graduates have learnt ∗ Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, 118 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. Email: xuy10@psu.edu C  2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd