It's Friday evening and two of Yang Qian's friends are playing video games at a nearby arcade. But the 22-year-old, a recent computer sciences graduate who just started working at a local software company, is at his weekly English class.
"This is very important, it is something I have to do," says Yang in English that already seems pretty good.
"If I want to have the sort of job that I am looking for, I need to be better at speaking English."
China is full of booming consumer markets, from car sales growing at 50 per cent a year to top-end apartments that developers sell within days of putting them on the market. But one of the most interesting is urban China's craze for the English language.
According to industry analysts, there are as many as 30,000 organisations or companies that offer English lessons outside school in China and the market has nearly doubled in the last five years to around $3.5 billion (Dh12.8 billion).
The proliferation of language schools says a lot about the ambitions of modern China. For many individual Chinese such as Yang, mastering English is a central part of their seemingly boundless aspirations, a tool to engage with the rest of the world in a way that their parents could never imagine and a path to a more interesting and lucrative career.
China's government, meanwhile, has made teaching English in primary schools one of its priorities a reflection of its desire for China to play a much bigger role in the global economy.
According to the British Council, the primary school emphasis on English means that there are 20 million new English speakers in the country each year.
More remarkably still, it estimated in a recent report that China may already have more English speakers than India.
China's English fever has turned some of its most successful teachers into cult heroes. As a young man, Michael Yu, founder of New Oriental, was rejected for a visa to study in the United States, so he started teaching English instead. His company is the biggest English language training company in China with schools in 40 cities and more than 5,000 teachers, and his classes became so famous that they spawned a market in bootlegged recordings.
Li Yang, meanwhile, runs an operation called ‘Crazy English' and sometimes attracts thousands to open-air lectures that mix a sort of evangelical fervour for the language with a patriotic sub-text. One of his mottoes is "conquering English, revitalising China".
Outside interest
Such success has attracted plenty of outside interest. New Oriental is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and other investors include Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, which has acquired three English language companies in China. But the collapse in December of KaiEn, which had been one of the largest schools in the Shanghai area, shows that the market is also fiercely competitive.
To survive, the best-known schools have had to adapt to specific features of the market. Crazy English's approach, which involves large crowds shouting out phrases in English, is designed to shake students out of the awkwardness many Chinese feel about speaking a foreign language.
New Oriental is best known for its short-term crash courses before exams for entrance to overseas universities; as many as half the Chinese students in the United States have taken one of the company's courses.
"There is something of a problem in the Chinese education system," Yu admitted in an interview last year, "that there is too much emphasis on getting ahead or going abroad, and not enough on the pleasure of learning and being creative."
— Financial Times
