Personal names are an important part of people's social identity, and they function socially as labels that both identify and distinguish an individual from others (Watzlawik et al., 2012). Cheang (2008) suggests that personal names can be a vehicle of self-presentation/self-promotion (cf. Goffman, 1980), not just a passive label, if the names are selected by the name bearers themselves. Although self-naming is also observed with a small minority of people who have changed their names given by their parents or close relations, the most common cases of self-presentation/self-promotion seem to be entertainers’ adopted stage names.

One of the most important components of a country's language policy is its planning on foreign languages and its decisions regarding which foreign language(s) to choose and teach to its people in the nation's school system (Cenoz & Gorter, 2012). The government generally makes a selection among the candidate languages on the basis of the languages' perceived economic and socio-political value inside and outside the country. However, the socio-economic power and prestige of languages are variable and bound to change over time (Wright, 2004). For this reason, changes are almost always observed in any country's foreign language policy.

China's stunning economic growth is now widely recognized around the globe (Wong, 2009). Its gross domestic product (GDP) is now the second largest in the world, and, according to the World Bank (2015), in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), it already has the world's largest economy, surpassing that of the United States. It is commonly claimed that China will be the strongest economic power in the near future, and that it will have a concomitantly more potent political and cultural influence on the rest of the world.