China's War on English
Global Economics
China's War on English
Illustration by 731The government “wants to make us respect the Chinese language and culture more,” says Guo Jintong, a 16-year-old Beijing high school student, as he sits in a Starbucks drinking a grande cappuccino. “With everyone wanting to go overseas to study, there is a craze for English and the West that you can say has become excessive. This could have a bad effect on China.” Guo says he plans to go to the U.S. for graduate school after getting his bachelor’s in physics in China.
China’s obsession with English dates to the establishment of foreign-language schools and translation centers—mainly for English—along China’s coast after the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, says Yang Rui, director of the Comparative Education Research Center at the University of Hong Kong. And while Russian was the official second language during the 1950s, English again took primacy when Deng Xiaoping launched economic reforms in 1978 and China was eager for technology and investment from the West. (Yang learned English by secretly listening to banned Voice of America broadcasts during the Cultural Revolution, when speaking a foreign tongue could land you in jail.)
Urban children usually begin studying English in the third grade, and it is one of three core subjects throughout elementary and high school, along with math and Chinese. Regardless of what field one chooses, passing an English proficiency test is required to get into university and graduate school. Academics who want to be promoted to a full professorship have to pass English examinations. Language training schools including New Oriental and Global Yasi School have opened branches across the country to meet the demand. “English has become more important not only in schools but in society as well,” says Wang Xiaoyang, product director of the Higher Education Research Institute at Tsinghua University. “Now it looks like China’s English fever has reached a high point.”
Why clamp down now? China by one measure—purchasing power parity—could become the world’s largest economy this year. It’s increasingly asserting itself overseas. Studying Chinese is growing in popularity in schools across the U.S., and China’s education authorities are pushing Chinese language and culture globally, in part through the opening of Confucius Institutes.94.1
Percentage of Chinese people who have trouble remembering characters
Top leader Xi Jinping has popularized the idea of a “Chinese Dream” aimed at providing an alternate source of aspiration for the nation’s youth now seen as blindly pursuing Western values and pleasures. “China has developed and become more confident about its own identity, and we think we can and need to say no to certain things; that, unfortunately, includes Western culture and English language,” says University of Hong Kong’s Yang. Zhan Haite, the 16-year-old daughter of migrant workers in Shanghai, says, “They are doing this because they want to show the world I’m proud that I’m Chinese. But they also want to close the door for Chinese students so they can’t see or know so much about the world.”
The authorities fear the Chinese are losing mastery over their written language. With smartphones, tablets, and computers equipped with character recognition software, Chinese have less need to remember the strokes for the 3,500 to 4,000 characters the average high school graduate is expected to know.
A survey last year by Beijing-based Horizon Research Consultancy Group found that 94.1 percent of Chinese occasionally had trouble remembering characters, while 26.8 percent said the problem occurred frequently. Television shows such as Hero of Hanzi (hanzi means Chinese character), where contestants compete to write characters—the equivalent of a spelling bee—have become national hits. The worries are starting to increase business at private Chinese-language tutoring schools that introduce children to classic literature such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The shift in emphasis away from English and toward Chinese will “drive demand for programs where children can learn more about traditional culture,” says Wang Naizhong, director at Dongxuetang, a private school in Beijing that teaches children their characters and Chinese traditions.
The bottom line: To bolster Chinese language and culture, the government is demoting English in schools.
With Jasmine Zhao
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