With the trend of global mobility and immigration, the Finnish government has been promoting integration and multiculturality since 1990. According to the Finnish National Agency for Education (FNAE), Heritage Language (oma äidinkieli) lessons aim to protect and develop immigrant students’ competencies in their heritage languages and cultures. Among the research on different heritage language (HL) programmes in Nordic contexts, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the Chinese language. Given the increasing number of Chinese immigrant families in and beyond Finland, the past decade has witnessed a growth of immigrant pupils in the Chinese HL programme (FNAE, 2011; 2022). The enrolled number of pupils has doubled compared with that of 2010, reaching over 850 Chinese HL learners in the Autumn term of 2021 (FNAE, 2022). This article aims to systemically review 20-year publications of Chinese HL courses in European contexts. Following Cooper’s (2017) guidance for research synthesis, the author will search relevant publications in both English (e.g. Web of Science and Scopus) and Chinese (i.e. CNKI) databases according to this paper’s research scope. Then, the author will set inclusion and exclusion criteria for abstract screening and eligibility for the next phase of in-depth review. The in-depth review results will summarise the research trends (e.g. focus, sites, participants, methods, and key findings) and suggest future research directions (e.g. new speaker identity, curricula and translanguaging pedagogy, parent-teacher partnership, teacher training and inclusion). More importantly, as many studies on Chinese HL have been conducted in traditional immigration contexts, mainly in Anglophone countries (Pu, 2019), this paper is expected to shed light on the understanding of HL education in Europe – which endows with multilingualism - by showing the complexity of HL education in European contexts.

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