The story of the English language and its educational relationship with Modern China runs parallel to the story of China and its relationship with the West. Lest we forget, it was not until Deng Xiaoping ascended to the pinnacle of Chinese government and opened his nation up to the outside world that English began to take on the importance that we see today. China's anglophone aspirations and its economic progress have come hand in hand, each influencing and moulding the other. Today, the role and status of the English language is one of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of China, both contributing to and yet undermining its growing economic might.

English teaching in China, once seen as the dreamy occupation of free-spirited travellers, has grown into a very serious industry that makes very serious money. According to the Guardian, there are today over 30,000 organisations or companies offering private English classes in China. When the costs of extra-curricular lessons are taken into account, the financial weight of English-language learning in China surely dwarfs any other educational drive in human history. It is, of course, the power of this industry and the raw appetite of so many Chinese to study English (roughly 20% of the population, at any given time) that fuels the import of native-English speakers to China each year.

These teachers are typically employed at private schools, such as Disney English or English First – schools which offer additional support for young children in learning English. For many Chinese, these schools represent a considerable financial sacrifice. Chinese parents, recognising that a future without English in a congested and swamped job market may be a bleak future indeed, invest huge amounts of their own money and their children's time in the hope of reaping the benefits of early English-language exposure.

Learning English: causes economic growth of vice versa?

Some may suggest that China's economic growth is a direct consequence of its embrace of the English language. Others argue that English has had little impact on China's growth, and that, in a chicken-and-egg reversal, it is the growth that breeds the almost irrelevant side-effect of wider English learning. Economic growth and its myriad social consequences make these conflicts of opinion almost impossible to resolve. Yet it remains clear that languages have the power to confer social status like nothing else. We need only consider the debasement of the Anglo-Saxon language in the last millennium, first at the hands of French after the Norman Conquest, then repeatedly at the hands of the literate elite's Latin through the Enlightenment, to see that the prestige a language enjoys can come to dominate all areas of society.

These moments in history are frequent, and such a moment has arrived in China. Nothing that has come before is, however, quite like this: an emergent middle-class, driven by a desire to see their (often only) children succeed economically, now habitually resort to extra-curricular English tuition as a primary means of guaranteeing their child's future. English has become something more than a practical tool; it has become a symbolic marker of social class. The middle-class is fast becoming defined through English, but, for many reasons, this relationship is problematic.

Is the cost worth the benefit?

Without wishing to undermine the pursuits of English teachers in China, it must be admitted that the industry has become something of a leech on many families’ resources and time. Consider the draconian educational pressures exerted on Chinese children today – in a typical middle school in the months leading up to the Gao Kao it is not uncommon for students to rise at 5.30 and return home, intoxicated on fatigue, at 22:00. A weekend at English First, one suspects, must conjure images of camels' backs and threateningly-positioned straws.

These pressures have risen exponentially in the Chinese education system alongside the rise of English, and it is often English alone that contributes to the many extra hours of study each evening or weekend. Widely maligned techniques such as rote memorisation are most closely associated with the learning of English, probably due to large class sizes rendering direct interaction impossible. Whilst many qualified foreign teachers greatly enhance Chinese students' learning experience, many others, imported to teach English solely on the basis of their mother tongue, are unqualified, and the benefit they offer to their students is negligible or illusory.

We may also wonder whether the need for English has not been exaggerated. China's economy is increasingly becoming self-sufficient, as export-driven profits are translated into internal construction. Further, China's trade with the United States does not require its entire population to devote much of their adolescence to a foreign tongue. International trade has for millennia subsisted upon a small number of bilingual experts. Students, at this very moment, will be sat, paralyzed by boredom, learning words or phrases for the sake of the act itself and the fraught social meaning it conveys, rather than the prospect of future use. How many of those twilight hours spent memorising the words 'pencil sharpener' and 'foreign student's dormitory' will ever surface into some kind of linguistic daylight?

Opportunity or exploit?

The hundreds of thousands of foreigners who yearly make the pilgrimage to China in order to teach their mother tongue rarely consider the implications of their presence. The private-schools they are employed by are, in one respect, offering considerable educational opportunities for Chinese children. Yet from another, more sinister angle, they are exploiting a collective middle-class neurosis about an essential need to learn English at all costs.

The huge profits of some of these schools, and their extortionate prices, lend some credence to the latter perspective. The outrageous time-tables of some Chinese state schools are simply rendered more severe, more damaging, by the presence of additional private schools: not content with giving up every waking hour of the week to learning, the weekend is similarly disposed of.

Chinese children frequently become enslaved by a circular culture of English learning, where the joys of language-acquisition are crushed by a background noise of economic pressure; of a need to learn in order to get a job, rather than to learn for the hidden wonders of a reinvented means of communication. It is difficult to enjoy a meal that has been force-fed.

Beyond this, though, there may come a time when China begins to feel its national identity compromised by the dominance of a neo-colonial language. Certainly, if China becomes the leading global economy, attitudes to its own language will radically change. If and when that time comes we may well see the current climate of English education – a multi-billion dollar industry – fade away into a distant memory, and all those force-fed meals spectacularly vomited up in a furore of linguistic revolution.
 

Related links
A Tried Method: Using Psychology to Get to Students
China English Teaching Horror Stories
Insider’s Guide to Teaching English in China

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Keywords: English teaching industry China cost of learning English in China private English organizations China bad side of English schools in China