The next long march

Kanti Bajpai

India has the third largest number of English speakers in the world after the United States and Britain. Economic pundits tell us that, along with our parliamentary institutions and stock market, this is one of India’s biggest assets in a globalising world. It’s India’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in the race with China. There is comfort in this as we struggle to make sense of our northern neighbour and its great leap forward over the past 20 years.

Judging by the steps that China is taking to advance the cause of English, our comfort may not last. Nin Qiang and Martin Wolff, specialists in English as a second language, have estimated that up to 600 million Chinese are studying English.  Gordon Brown, the British Labour Party leader, noted in Beijing recently that by 2025 China will have more English speakers than there are native English speakers in the world.

These numbers are staggering. Not surprisingly, business is gearing up for the opportunity. A group that developed TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) has calculated that China is the world’s largest market for English-language services, worth $60 billion. The publisher Macmillan has sold 100 million English-language textbooks in China. One fifth of all textbook sales in China are English. There are at least 50,000 private language schools teaching English to eager Chinese.

These are just some facts and figures revealed in an article in The Economist.  There is more. According to Newsweek, 400 English teaching companies are trying to enter China. Nor is this trend recent. In 1998, there were over 300 private and joint-venture English learning centres in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Increasingly, Chinese employers want proof of English-language skills. Qiang and Wolff suggest that China is recruiting 100,000 foreign experts to teach English as a Second Language (ESL).  Newsweek reports that China has even recruited in India.

The Chinese government has made English the official second language of China. It also encourages its civil servants to learn English.  In 2001, the Beijing Youth Daily reported that 20,000 out of 100,000 civil servants in Beijing were studying English.  By the early 1980s, the government had restored English to the status of a compulsory subject for college entrance. In 1993, English was made a compulsory subject for Grade 4 students and above. Ten years later, the government made English compulsory in Grade 1.

Over a decade, China lowered the English-learning age from 12 to nine to six years old. Today, most primary schools, virtually all middle and senior-middle schools, and all colleges and universities have mandatory English.  There is a move also to teach specialised technical courses in English on the argument that most of the world’s technical subjects are taught, written about, and discussed in “global English”.

Here is another index of how important English is in China. Get onto google.com and hit in the appropriate search words. You will get tens-of-millions of entries related to the subject.

Is China going to become an English-language superpower? Not tomorrow, but the tea leaves need to be read. What are the problems facing China?  Scholars of English in China, such as Ji Shaobin, Yuan-yuan Huang and Hua-li Xu, list a number of constraints.  There are still not enough teachers of the subject in China.  Teaching methods remain antiquated. Most teachers suffer from a lack of cultural awareness of the Anglo-Saxon world, the world of English more broadly, a severe constraint in language teaching.

There is also the politics of English in China. The government worries that too much English might aid subversion and democracy. Ordinary Chinese too have doubts.  English could endanger the “purity” of China’s age-old or post-revolutionary culture. There is resentment and uncertainty amongst China’s English language teachers over the entry of foreign language trainers and institutes —resentment because they are taking jobs away and uncertainty over their ability to teach English if they do not know the Chinese language. Others think that foreign trainers who know Chinese are ineffective because they lapse into Mandarin.

What does all this mean for India?  The state of the English language in India is worrisome. While Indian languages are the lifeblood of India and its people, English has a crucial place.  The competition in English is not just from China but also the rest of Asia and even Africa. We need to do some hard thinking and forget the tiresome debates about English as a form of alienation.

The author is headmaster, The Doon School.