China should use textbooks in English
This is not only for students in physics major. 10 years ago, my wife was studying international corporation management in a prestigious University, she and her classmates had problem reading those Chinese Textbooks, which are no more than just translation and editing of standard textbooks in English. However, the translation is very difficult to understand and most of the students were just confused and lost their interest.
That was 10 years ago but I am pretty sure the same thing happens now as long as there are no enough professors who can teach with the textbooks in English.
The situation probably is better for physics major because it is somewhat dissociated from the society context. However, although students had no problem learning most of the fundamental courses in the undergraduate level, but later on it is a big obstacle when they do research since English is the communication language, and mostly people will refer to textbook in English if they need.
Not only that affects the learning process, it also makes interdisciplinary research quite difficult. For example, I am doing condensed matter physics, if I want to do something related organic thin films, or bio-related experiments. Reading related literature will be difficult since I do not know the specific terms in English. Of cause you can say if I am very determined I should spend time to re-learn these, but everyone knows the life of a researcher nowadays is busy. Another example, I’ve a friend in biology department doing some research with stem cell project and he uses some equipment with amplifiers, and he found it a problem to understand all the electronics since he already forgot those things learned in college. If the manual is in Chinese, probably he can still understand something, but since it is in English he felt it is too time consuming to understand it at all.
I am not saying I do not like Chinese language. In fact, I do believe Chinese characters have their own beauty and can express much more feelings than alphabet characters. However, as when the center of science moved from Europe to American, the communication language is changed from German to English, the only way to catch the progress is to learn as much as possible with the current communication language. For China, it is an easier choice to teach things in Chinese, but later on the students have to pay more to be able to do real research. Many Chinese textbooks are just a concise version of the English textbook (or Russian textbook), although similar but lost the favor of original text. And sometimes, the historic context is omitted which makes the book very technical and the students do not know where the stuff comes from.
Recently, when coming back to China in 2005, I noticed improvements that new “auxiliary” books with more historic backgrounds are available, and the English names of the theories are included within parentheses. This helps since at least students can recognize the corresponding English names of the theory. But I still prefer to use the current original textbooks, and if the professors do have their opinions they can publish some notes. The bad thing is some professors just consider publishing a textbook as a big achievement and can be used to get higher salaries etc.
One more step ahead, is to utilize the resource in this Internet era. There are online videos courses taught by some first-class scholars (e.g. linear algebra http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/Video/video-fall-99.html ). I can’t see any reason why not use this as the standard “class material” and the professors are just responsible to answer questions and provide more specific guidance to the students. That would be a big change of the classroom, but I believe that is far more efficient for spreading knowledge.
For future students exposed to English textbooks earlier, I believe they will have more interest and more contributions later.