In go-go Beijing, English is the talk of the town
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-10-23 21:41

If you had wandered into the courtyard of Beijing's Imperial Ancestral Temple the other day, you might have thought you had stumbled on a tent revival without the tent. And, in a way, you would be right.

On a series of stages, chipper presenters in headset microphones preached a gospel of self-improvement, sacrifice and personal transformation. But the gospel was not religious; it was linguistic.

Each stage carried a sprightly advertisement for a different English-language school, each name conjuring the air of success: Wall Street English. Dell English International. On one stage, a peppy woman beneath a banner for the Beijing Great School showcased the high-energy approach at one of scores of new English-teaching institutes cropping up across the capital.

"Are you happy?" she shouted.

"I am happy!" came the lusty callback from the crowd of more than 100 professionals, parents and puzzled-looking children.

"Are you hungry?" she yelled.

"I am hungry!" they shouted.

The evangelical fervor at the Beijing Foreign Language Festival was just part of the growing boom in English education across China, where a vast new middle class has elevated English into something more than a second language. In the minds of many urban Chinese today, it is not just the global language of business and technology but also a totem of ambition and status: A ticket to a new you.

"If I am going to be a flight attendant, then I need to speak good English," said Wu Yan, a 19-year-old student at Beijing Tourism University, clutching an overstuffed plastic bag full of promotional pamphlets. Her parents, a retired factory engineer and laborer in a button factory, speak nothing but Mandarin. If Wu is to enroll in an English course, she says, she will need to get a loan to cover the $500 in tuition--nearly half the average urbanite's annual income.

"I think it's such a beautiful profession," she said of China's nascent domestic air industry, which scarcely existed a decade ago. "English will help me rise in my field and see all the places I've never been."

Not long ago, the People's Republic of China lived by a communist-Confucian ethic that shunned displays of personal ambition and denounced the cultural hegemony of the West. In the last century, China plunged through bouts of xenophobia. One of the most notable came during the Cultural Revolution when young party zealots destroyed mountains of foreign books and scrubbed English names from schools and hospitals.

Entrepreneurs idealized

But today, China is not defined by ideology and isolation but instead is driven by a hunger for economic, personal and political change. The model workers of today's China are no longer wizened farmers and bricklayers but young real estate moguls and Internet millionaires.

The icons are brash self-made tycoons, such as 40-year-old Jack Ma, who started out as an English teacher and translator before building business portal Alibaba.com and partnering with Yahoo in a deal that made him a billionaire.

Under China's old state-controlled economy, the government deeded out desirable sinecures, but today's college graduates are competing for coveted positions at well-heeled firms. At Beijing's busiest bookstores, the self-improvement and personal finance aisles are often crowded with rows of readers sitting on the floor and leaning against the walls, absorbing texts they can't quite afford to buy.

The costs for full-fledged English courses range from a few pennies a day for group classes of more than 50 students up to $1,000 a month for one-on-one tutoring in business terms.

Audiotapes for cabdrivers

The government has gotten into the spirit. Beijing will be host to the Olympic Games in 2008, and China is determined to make the event a showcase of its cosmopolitan makeover. The capital is handing out audiotapes of useful English phrases to thousands of steadfastly monolingual cabdrivers. A separate campaign is under way to rid the city of nonsensical or unfortunate translations, like the occasional handicapped-accessible restroom tagged in English as a "deformed man toilet."

This year's foreign language festival drew 35,000 people over two days, organizers said. No spot was left unused on the grounds of the 600-year-old temple. Tutor services and textbook vendors lined a courtyard shaded by soaring willows. Along footpaths, placards of English phrases taught a stern lesson: Pride goes before a fall. All roads lead to Rome. Justice has long arms.

Basics not enough

The merging of English teaching with self-help coaching is the product of two decades of market reforms, said Terence Peng, a former Microsoft Corp. programmer who is president of Dell English International, which is not affiliated with the computer company. He knows his customers won't be satisfied with just grammar and vocabulary.

"I tell them you need to be `persistent.' You must be `hardworking' and you must be `determined.' Together, that makes P.H.D.," he said.

Indeed, on this day business was booming at Dell, where a panel of crisply dressed teachers--wearing the school's eagle insignia, closely modeled on the U.S. presidential seal--assessed new students' abilities.

`Never admitting defeat'

"What work do you do?" asked teacher Ronen Geisler, a bespectacled 22-year-old who arrived from Toronto just a week ago, part of a stream of young instructors recruited from overseas.

"I have been working for six years as the general manager of a joint-venture company," said Cathy Shen, a 25-year-old graduate of Beijing's Foreign Language University. "We have over 20 employees. As a general manager, my responsibility is to work with other departments to serve our customers."

"And in your spare time?" Geisler asked.

"I enjoy mountain climbing and swimming. I enjoy never admitting defeat, which is a strong part of my character," Shen said.

10,000 words in 10 days

The students can seem feverishly ambitious, and that leaves them vulnerable. One vendor hawked a book he pledged would deliver business fluency in 10 weeks; another touted a DVD that could do it in three. Dell teacher Liu Ren has the loftiest promises of them all, pledging that his special style will teach a student 10,000 English words in just 10 days.

Some 200 students crowded to hear Liu as he scribbled on a dry-erase board. "In English, the word, `jack' means thug, hooligan," he yelled, scrawling out the letters "Highjack." That word, he continued, pausing for effect, blends "highway" and "thug" to create "Highjack." He underlined it.

Dressed in black, Liu was just getting started. "The screenwriters gave the name Jack to the character in `Titanic,'" he shouted, "because the character was from the lowest rung of society, who earned his ticket through gambling and seduced the lovely Rose."