Once, while wandering through the densely packed neighbourhoods of the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, I happened upon an outdoor class of children singing a song in English. They were enrolled in a bilingual preschool called Clever Rabbit (聪明小兔), where they spent part of their time in free play and part of their time learning English words, songs, and rhymes. The school had a poster outside advertising new classes starting at different age levels, with the youngest catering to children aged from birth to six months.

From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, I researched the private language industry in Shenyang, looking at the ways language has been incorporated into people’s everyday lives. This school was no outlier. English education in China is in high demand, forming a massive cultural industry. Parents feel tremendous pressure to have their child learn English. That explains why young children, even infants who probably spend most of their time either crying or napping, would be enrolled in an English class like the one at Clever Rabbit; the earlier, people say, the better.

While English is part of the national school curriculum, with most students getting four hours a week of formal instruction from the third grade onwards, almost every family with whom I spoke arranged additional classes for their child. Teachers hosted extra lessons in their homes after school and most urban parents enrolled their child in evening and weekend classes, with lessons often taught by young foreign speakers from countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Summer and winter vacations meant even more classes, often lasting the whole day. And parents also bought countless books, audio lessons, practice tests, dictionaries, and posters to stimulate their child’s education. Recall that for many years China employed the One-Child Policy that limited families to a single offspring. Even though the policy was rescinded in 2021, most families still limit themselves to one child because of the huge financial costs of bringing up a child in China today, intensifying the pressure on the next generation to succeed and provide for their parents in old age.

In 2021, China’s State Council responded to such pressures by instituting a series of educational reforms commonly known as the Double Reduction Policy (双减政策), aimed at reducing the burden on students and parents. It mandates increased teacher training, limits the amount of homework that can be assigned, and increases afterschool care programs at schools. By far the most critical intervention, however, are the limits placed on private educational programs like Clever Rabbit or the numerous other schools offering English-language teaching and tutoring. No new licences will be granted, and existing schools must now register as non-profit organisations, with limits on the days and times they can operate (Qian et al. 2024).

The impacts of these changes will take years to play out, but it already appears that the goal of reducing educational pressure has not been realised. On the contrary, many parents now seem even more anxious: where will they find the necessary extracurricular preparation that their child needs to succeed in examinations (Zhang et al. 2024)? As one parent complains in a representative social media post: ‘Can we really stop learning English? Very clearly not … The middle school and college entrance examinations still exist, and the scoring has not changed.’ Echoing a classical saying, the parent continues: ‘This means that on the path to learning English, children still have a “heavy load and a long road”.’

Obviously, then, English in China remains a big deal. I live in Canada right now, an officially bilingual country, but I have never seen the kind of passion and commitment parents and students bring to second language learning as I did in China. Mandarin might be the official language of the nation (and minority languages like Cantonese, Fujianese, Shanghainese, and so on represent regional identities within it), but English maintains a quasi-official status as the language of globalisation and China’s future. Why does English play such an outsized role? After all, very few of the students at Clever Rabbit or any of the other private schools will study abroad. Some people might eventually do business with foreign companies or need to communicate with outsiders. But think about it: every single Chinese citizen studies English in school. It is a major component of the university entrance exams and you had better list your English test score on your resumé if you want to get a job.

Language Learning Motivations

When talking about why people learn a language, the tradition in psychology has been to divide motivation into two types: instrumentality (learning a language to get a job or pass an exam) and integration (the idea that learning a language connects you to a people and a culture) (Dörnyei 1990). More recent research has added complexity to this, but the main idea remains the same: either we are learning a language to achieve a practical goal or we are learning a language because we like the people who speak it. There is certainly some truth to that, but the theory neglects how English is integrated with other social movements and developments in China.

In little more than a century, China shifted from an empire to a republic to a socialist state and now to a hyper-capitalist superpower. A formerly rural society, there has been a massive wave of migration from the countryside to urban centres over the past 40 years as economic opportunities have grown. These transformations have prompted anxieties (social, political, and economic) about the future. In general, people talk about a scramble to get ahead and the fear of being left behind. The dream is to be wealthy, mobile, sophisticated, working for a multinational company, and able to jet off to Paris whenever the mood strikes. These attempts by people to position themselves—and their child—as new kinds of citizens, to remake themselves as global cosmopolitans, are what is driving the continuing English fever in China.

The government plays a significant role in these efforts. Schooling in China often attempts to harness the power of education to shape its citizenry. Curriculum in China is not simply about conveying knowledge but producing what is known as ‘quality’ (素质 suzhi) in its students. That is not an easy term to translate, but it points to the inherent class and sophistication of various groups of people. We can think of suzhi as the stereotype of the polite, civilised, and productive urbanite (市民) as opposed to the rough, ignorant, and uncultured rural peasant (农民) (Woronov 2008). These ideologies do not describe real people, but they are a key feature of modern imaginaries in China. Schools therefore impart lessons about discipline, patriotism, communal responsibility (like having students clean their own classrooms), and social competition. As Miguel Pérez-Milans (2013: 22) explains, the goal of education is to produce a ‘body of loyal and trusting citizens with restricted rights, under the tutelage of the government’. Everyone is responsible for pushing themselves to the limit to achieve their dreams under this system; there are no trophies for participation in China.

This has been a longstanding theme in Chinese philosophical and religious writings going back more than 2,000 years. The Confucian ideal of the ‘noble person’ (君子 junzi) required a constant process of spiritual refinement and self-cultivation (Fischer 2022). People had to be shaped to virtue—something that was done through language. The mysteries of Classical Chinese, which affluent young men spent years acquiring so they could pass through the imperial examination system to positions of power and influence, marked them as refined and cultivated people. During the early twentieth century, when the Chinese intellectual Hu Shih sought to inspire a ‘radical awakening’ among his people, he did so by proposing a ‘new language, a language which can be used and understood by tongue and ear and pen, and which will be a living language for the people’ (Hu 1926: 271). He advocated for the elevation of the non-literary common speech to fill this role, although a few other scholars unsuccessfully pressed for languages such as Esperanto or even English.

More recently, based on fieldwork in the popular backpacking destination of Yangshuo, which has made it attractive to Chinese learning English, the sociolinguist Shuang Gao (2016) has looked at discourses that circulate through the community of Chinese English-language learners. These include stories of people who quit high-paying jobs so they could dedicate all their time to language study and move up the social ladder. They hustle from school to school, cornering native English speakers in bars and restaurants to pepper them with questions as they attempt to practise their conversational skills. Gao argues that, for these students, ‘their proactive pursuit of English at least constitutes an attempt, if not an imperative, to seek self-development and stay competitive’ (2016: 417).

China’s English Future

These various strains of thought have come together in the context of China’s current engagement with English. Many visitors to China, who often avoid venturing beyond the busy shopping streets of Beijing and Shanghai, see the popularity of McDonalds and Hollywood movies as evidence of a Westernising cultural landscape. The popularity of English plays into such fantasies of a country on the brink of radical change, of Chinese who have adopted European values and American attitudes because they have been learning a language. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is the popularity of English merely about pragmatic concerns like getting a better job. Rather, it is about becoming a different kind of person, one rooted in very Chinese notions of self.

In my own research (Henry 2021), I have looked at how English students in China narrate their language acquisition. It is never just a story of teachers and classes, but one of personal growth and change. English opens new insights into their lives, deepening their awareness and wisdom. They become more confident, capable, and perceptive. As one woman told me of her language study: ‘I dare to compete and to struggle for it.’ And they also chart paths forward about how they will go abroad, expand their horizons, and come back to China as changed individuals. If we remember here how China’s modern history has been allegorically described as a shift from peasants to urbanites, English is described as the catalyst for moving individual people further along that path.

Since 2010, a new wave of nationalism in China has led to a reduction in the significance of English in university entrance examinations (Zhao 2016), and some people have started to question how useful this language is to a country gradually taking prominence on the world stage. Several commentators have claimed that China’s experiment with English is nearly over. But for all of China’s growing sense of itself as a modern, developed, and advanced nation, English suffuses educational systems, public messaging, and individual self-consciousness. In fact, in my own interviews with parents and students engaged in this great educational endeavour, very few expressed any hesitation or ambivalence about the language. It was commonly described to me as a language of the future, and many people envisioned a time, not too far off, when everyone in China would be able to speak English.

The only undercurrent of change may come, not from a resistance to English itself, but from grassroots social movements that are beginning to challenge—and in some cases outright reject—the unspoken social contract Pérez-Milans outlined above: that success will come from hard work and the guiding hand of the Communist Party. Variously described as ‘lying flat’ (躺平) or ‘letting it rot’ (摆烂), these movements point to a growing sense of disillusionment among China’s youth with the type of zealous striving required by China’s educational system. It comes from a realisation that family wealth and connections will almost always trump individual talent in the pursuit of wealth and upward mobility. These sentiments may even be the impetus behind the Double Reduction Policy described above, but while significant, there is still an abiding interest in the types of aspirational self-transformation offered by language learning (Hizi 2021).

English and Chinese Selfhood

The evidence and studies I have presented here all point to English continuing as a significant force in China. The language was never just a practical concern for Chinese citizens but is instead wrapped up in the ongoing transformations of Chinese society. Someone who can speak English fluently is not just considered smarter or harder working than others; they are a different kind of person. Their selfhood, their moral constitution, their embedding within a global sphere of influence—all make them different from an ordinary Chinese citizen who cannot speak English. In that sense, it will be part of the Chinese story for many years to come.