Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos Page B

résumé, help attract a spouse, or vault you out of a village. Men and women on Gong’s dating site often included their English proficiency in descriptions of themselves, alongside mention of cars and houses. Every college freshman had to meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it was the only foreign language tested. In a novel called English , the author, Wang Gang, a teacher in a rural school, says, “If I rearranged the words in the [English] dictionary, the entire world would open up before me.”
    This was a sharp reversal from the past. In nineteenth-century China, English was held in contempt as the language of the middlemen who dealt with foreign traders. “These men are generally frivolous rascals and loafers in the cities and are despised in their villages and communities,” the reformist scholar Feng Guifen wrote in 1861. But Feng knew that China needed English for diplomatic purposes, and he called for the creation of special language schools. “There are many brilliant people in China; there must be some who can learn from the barbarians and surpass them,” he wrote. Mao favored Russian for the country, and he expelled so many English teachers that, by the sixties, China had fewer than a thousand high school English teachers nationwide. After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold. Eighty-two percent of those polled in 2008 thought it was vital to learn English. (In America, 11 percent thought it was vital to learn Chinese.) By 2008 an estimated 200 million to 350 million Chinese were studying English. China’s largest English school system, New Oriental, was traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
    I wanted to meet a man named Li Yang, China’s most popular English teacher and perhaps the world’s only language instructor known to bring students to tears of excitement. Li was the head teacher and editor in chief of his own company, Li Yang Crazy English. His students recited his biography with the consistency of an incantation: he grew up the son of Party propagandists whose harsh discipline left him too shy to answer the telephone; he nearly flunked out of college but then he prepared for an English exam by reading aloud and found that the louder he read, the bolder he felt and the better he spoke; he became a campus celebrity and turned it into an empire. In the two decades since he began teaching, he had appeared in person before millions of Chinese adults and children.
    In the spring of 2008, I visited him when he was overseeing an intensive daylong seminar at a small college on the outskirts of Beijing. He arrived accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant. He stepped into a classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a charcoal-colored car coat. He was thirty-eight years old, and his black hair was set off by a faint silver streak.
    Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, selected by Beijing hospitals to work at the following summer’s Olympic Games. But like millions of English learners in China, they had almost no confidence speaking the language that they had spent years studying by textbook. Li had made his name with an ESL technique that a Hong Kong newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argued, was the way to unleash what he called the “international muscles.” Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “ I! ” they thundered back.
    â€œWould!”
    â€œ Would! ”
    â€œLike!”
    â€œ Like! ”
    â€œTo!”
    â€œ To! ”
    â€œTake!”
    â€œ Take! ”
    â€œYour!”
    â€œ Your! ”
    â€œTem! Per! Ture!”
    â€œ Tem! Per! Ture! ”
    One by one,