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COMMENT
Editorial
Articles in English Today relating to English in
China are amongst the most frequently down-
loaded and cited and the editors are pleased to
have the opportunity to bring together a number
of contributions on this theme in this special
issue. Readers seem interested in all aspects of
the topic, from research related to the linguistic fea-
tures of ‘China English’, to the extent to which
English is used and in what domains, to edu-
cational policy, issues of culture and identity, lin-
guistic landscapes, code-switching and more.
Not least, there seems to be an appetite for num-
bers, especially very large ones. Of course, any
numbers relating to China seem large compared
to their equivalents elsewhere in the world. India
is the only other country which can compete with
China when it comes to the numbers of English
learners and users –indeed a rivalry appears to
have developed between India and China as to
which of them now has the larger number.
Rining Wei and Jinzhi Su in ‘The statistics of
English in China’respond to a complaint made in
an earlier article (from Bolton 2008, English
Today, 24(2)) about the lack of credible data
regarding the numbers of people learning and
using English in China today. In their article,
they present interesting survey data which is not
widely available to scholars outside China. China
has been long regarded as an ‘Expanding Circle’
country (to use Kachru’s well-known term), in
which English is learned and used as a foreign
language. Expanding Circle countries are in part
defined by their looking towards native speakers
for norms of correctness and use. The increasingly
important role that China now seems to be playing
in the development of English as a global language
has thus caught many observers by surprise.
This issue provides a range of views from inside
mainland China of how the uses of English are
developing, in ways which challenge the familiar
distinctions between first, second and foreign
language usage.
Interest in English in China seems to be world-
wide, perhaps hinting at how the English language
is now helping China reshape globalisation. As
Bolton and Graddol (this issue) observe, English
has become not just a commodity in itself (profita-
ble to both western and Chinese businesses), but is
also a gateway to flows of international students,
traders and professional workers (both from and
to China). English thus plays an important role in
the steady expansion of Chinese influence in the
world, whether in Africa, Latin America or else-
where in Asia.
The articles included here cover a wide range of
topics, and help us to see how the research agenda
for English in China is widening. The collection is,
however, by no means definitive in its reach. There
are many topics which are not covered, and we
have excluded contributions from Hong Kong,
which has long enjoyed a higher visibility in the
research literature.
The collection as a whole shows the importance
of work by bilingual researchers and of collabor-
ation between western and Chinese scholars.
Interest in English in China is unlikely to diminish,
and we hope to see many more contributions to ET
in the future from scholars in mainland China and
the greater China region.
The editors
The editorial policy of English Today is to provide a focus or forum for all sorts of news and opinion from around the world. The
points of view of individual writers are as a consequence their own, and do not reflect the opinion of the editorial board. In
addition, wherever feasible, ET generally leaves unchanged the orthography (normally British or American) and the usage of
individual contributors, although the editorial style of the journal itself is that of Cambridge University Press.
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The statistics of English in China
RINING WEI AND JINZHI SU
An analysis of the best available data from government sources
Introduction
In the mid-1980s, Crystal (1985) lamented that there
were no reliable figures available for the number of
learners to whom English is taught as a foreign
language in many regions of the world, and that
‘China has always been excluded from the statistical
reviews, because of the shortage of information from
inside the country’(Crystal, 1985: 9). More recently,
Bolton (2008: 6) similarly notes that because of ‘the
absence of accurate language surveys’academics
have to make educated guesses regarding the total
number of those learning/knowing English. The
figure of the total English learners/users in China
has been estimated to be somewhere between 200
and 350 million (cf. Bolton, 2003: 48; Kachru,
1997; McArthur, 2003; Zhao & Campbell, 1995;
Graddol, 2006: 95). Fortunately, a national language
survey in China conducted at the turn of the century
does provide some hard statistics on the number of
English language learners/users in the world’smost
populous country, and also sheds some light on the
realities of use of English and English proficiency
among the Chinese people.
The proposal for this national survey entitled
‘Survey of Language Situation in China’(hereafter
‘the national survey’) was approved at the No. 134
Meeting of the Premier Office of the State Council
on January 6, 1997. The implementation of the survey
was coordinated by eleven ministerial-level govern-
ment organs: the Ministry of Education, the
National Language Commission, the State Ethnic
Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Public
Security, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry
of Finance, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry
of Culture, the State Administration of Radio, Film
and Television, the National Bureau of Statistics
and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Part
of the national survey findings were published by
the Steering Group Office for Survey of Language
Situation in China (hereafter the SGO) in 2006. The
scale of this survey is the largest of its kind in the his-
tory of China and provides the most authoritative data
to date for an understanding of language situations in
different parts of China (SGO, 2006: 299). The popu-
lation studied comprised residents of Chinese nation-
ality in Mainland China (viz. the Chinese territory
excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan).
The national survey, utilising a probability pro-
portionate to size (PPS) sampling method, covered
a total of 165,000 households from 1,063 munici-
palities, districts and counties. Given the ‘very
good’representativeness of the sample (SGO,
RINING WEI is a
Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Department of Chinese and
Bilingual Studies, Faculty of
Humanities, The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University. His
areas of research include
bilingual education,
language policy, world
Englishes, and quantitative
research methods. He is currently working on a
research monograph entitled Initiating and
Implementing Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL) in China: A Shanghai Perspective.
Email: tonydingdang@hotmail.com
JINZHI SU, PhD, is Director
of the Sociolinguistic Section
at Institute of Applied
Linguistics, Ministry of
Education of China. He is
also Professor at the
Graduate School of Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences,
where he supervises a number
of PhD students. His fields of
specialisation include the history of Chinese
languages and cultures, sociolinguistic theory and
history, language planning and language policy, and
language and law. He has published many reports
and papers on language surveys concerning the use
of Putonghua, Chinese dialects, and English in
China. Email: sjzhi@sina.com.cn
doi:10.1017/S0266078412000235
10 English Today 111, Vol. 28, No. 3 (September 2012). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2012 Cambridge University Press
2006: 325), its findings are believed to be generali-
sable to the whole population (for a technical report
of the statistical calculations, see SGO, 2006: 327–
38). Although the data collection of the survey had
been planned to be completed within one year (i.e.
in the year of 1999) (SGO, 2006: 343), due to the
size of the task and the unpredictability of field
study, the data collection phase turned out to con-
sume over two years (viz. from September 1999
to March 2001) (SGO, 2006: 361). It took about
five years for the majority of data to come out in
a collated form (SGO, 2006), partially because of
the outbreak of SARS in 2003, and partly because
of the delay in the release of the fifth national census
data needed for data collation (Wei and Su, 2011b).
In 2007, the National Language Commission started
to sponsor research projects on further analyses of
the survey data (SGO, 2006: 357), and in-depth ana-
lyses of the results in journal papers are now begin-
ning to appear (Wei & Su, 2008, 2011a, 2011b).
This article aims to inform international academia
about this national survey, and to discuss results of
the survey relevant to the learning and use of the
English language in China. In the following sections,
along with the national averages, data about Beijing,
Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing are provided, for
two main reasons. First, each of these cities is a zhix-
iashi, namely a city with a status equivalent to a pro-
vince and reporting direct to the central government,
and a zhixiashi is usually more socio-economically
homogeneous than a province. Second, the selected
cities, especially Shanghai, are in the forefront of
ELT reforms in China and often capture research
attention (Hu, 2002; Zou & Zhang, 2011).
How many million English learners?
The national survey reveals that out of those with
junior secondary education qualifications or above,
67.4% in China had studied at least one foreign
language (SGO, 2006: 118). The fifth national cen-
sus conducted in 2000 shows that some 48.7%
1
of
the national population (totally approx. 1.27 billion)
held junior secondary or above education qualifica-
tions, so some 32.86% of the national population,
totalling 415.95 million, had studied one or more
foreign languages (National Bureau of Statistics of
China, 2001). As Table 1 below shows, among the
people with foreign-language learning experience
in Mainland China, as many as 93.8% had studied
English, 7.1% Russian, and 2.5% Japanese, while
only 0.3% of respondents reported learning any
other foreign language. That is to say, among
415.95 million Chinese foreign-language learners,
390.16 million had learnt English. English had
been studied by an overwhelming majority of
foreign-language learners in different regions of
China, with the proportion ranging from a low
of 82.7% in Heilongjiang Province to a high of
98.7% in Hainan Province (SGO, 2006: 119).
In terms of the number of learners of foreign
languages, English is the most popular foreign
language in China, with Russian and Japanese
ranking second and third respectively. Wei & Su
(2008) suggest that for the foreseeable future,
English will retain this status, while the relative sta-
tus of Russian and Japanese in the country may
change in favour of the learning of Japanese.
Based on an analysis of a sub-sample from the
Shanghai population, Wei & Su (2008) note that
over 50% of Japanese learners fell within the
below-35 age group, compared with fewer than
2% of Russian learners within this category, and
suggest that amongst the younger generation in
Shanghai, Japanese has overtaken Russian as the
second most popular foreign language.
Frequency in the use of English
Partly because English has no official status in
Mainland China, a low degree of English-using fre-
quency among the Chinese is hardly surprising.
According to Table 2, only 7.3% and 23.3% of the
people that had studied English claimed to use
English ‘often’and ‘sometimes’respectively. In
other words, only 30% of the Chinese with English
learning experience used this foreign language in
their daily lives, although the corresponding percen-
tages for the selected cities, ranging from 31% in
Chongqing (for often/sometimes) to 46% in
Tianjin, were higher than the national average.
Unfortunately, the English use data from the
national survey, elicited with only one questionnaire
item, did not provide information regarding various
dimensions of ‘use’(e.g. reading, listening, speaking,
and writing). A better understanding of the use of
English has yet to be achieved with more compre-
hensive data. Other studies, though based on non-
random samples, provide some complementary
information concerning how the Chinese use
English. For instance, according to a survey invol-
ving 260 parents of primary and secondary stu-
dents in Shanghai, 52% of the respondents did
not know English, 24%–33% knew English but
rarely used it when reading, watching TV, or listen-
ing to radio, and only 15%–24% used English in
such activities on a weekly basis, despite the
readily accessible online or printed materials in
English and hours of English programming each
day from radio stations and TV channels.
THE STATISTICS OF ENGLISH IN CHINA 11
Furthermore, only 8.1%, 5.0% and 3.8% of the
respondents used English at work at least once
per day, per week and per month (Wei, 2010).
Spoken and reading proficiency in
English
The English proficiency of the Chinese can also
account for their limited use of this language reported
above. Table 3 reveals that 1.8% of those that had
studied English claimed to be able to act as
interpreters on formal occasions, 3.53% to converse
quite fluently, 15.61% to conduct daily conversa-
tions, 61.54% to say some greetings, and 17.54%
to utter a few words; put differently, 21% reported
possession of a spoken competence in English
which allowed them to sustain a conversation beyond
initial greetings whereas the corresponding percen-
tages in the selected cities were generally higher.
In contrast, the reported reading proficiency of
respondents was better than their spoken proficiency,
perhaps as a result of the traditional teaching meth-
odology that did not pay sufficient heed to listening
and speaking and hence tended to produce
‘deaf-and-dumb’English learners (Wei and Su,
2008). According to Table 4, among those respon-
dents that had studied English, 3.26% claimed to
be able to read English books and periodicals freely,
12.67% to read books and periodicals with the aid of
dictionaries and other tools, 12.8% to understand
simple reading passages, 43.23% to understand
simple sentences, and 28.04% to recognise only a
few English words. In other words, 72% of those
that had learnt English could at least understand
simple written sentences in English, and, if a more
stringent criterion were adopted, it might be inferred
that some 29% respondents possessed reasonable
English reading proficiency. As with the results relat-
ingtospokenproficiency, the results for reading
proficiency were generally higher in the selected
cities than the national average (for further analysis,
see Wei & Su, 2011b).
In the early 2000s, Crystal (2003: 68) observed
that ‘no one knows the (English) proficiency reali-
ties in China’. While the data reported above shed
some light on the English proficiency of Chinese
people, they have all the usual limitations of self-
reported information. To tackle the issue of the dis-
parity between self-rated and actual proficiency, it
was originally suggested that a sub-sample of
respondents be selected and evaluated (Wang,
1999), although, because of insufficient resources,
this suggestion was not eventually adopted. In
future research, in order to investigate English
proficiency more accurately, it will be desirable
Table 1: Foreign languages learnt by respondents that had studied foreign languages
English French Russian Spanish Arabic Japanese German Others
Mainland China 93.8% 0.29% 7.07% 0.05% 0.13% 2.54% 0.13% 0.16%
Beijing 85.37% 1.44% 19.40% 0.23% 0.00% 5.68% 0.58% 0.25%
Shanghai 91.74% 0.62% 11.71% 0.07% 0.00% 6.13% 0.55% 0.14%
Tianjin 92.98% 1.40% 9.15% 0.11% 0.00% 5.13% 0.11% 0.02%
Chongqing 94.88% 0.33% 7.50% 0.13% 0.01% 2.29% 0.32% 0.2%
Source: SGO, 2006: 119
12 ENGLISH TODAY 111 September 2012
to adjust and/or complement self-reported data
with more objective measures.
Conclusion
Graddol (2006: 15) notes that Asia, especially
India and China, probably now holds the key to
the long-term future of English as a global
language. In his latest book on English in India
in the English Next series, Graddol (2010: 14) con-
cludes that China may already have more people
who speak English than India. It is hoped that the
data provided above can assist international
researchers in their assessment of English in
Table 2: Frequency in the use of English among respondents who had studied English
often sometimes seldom
Mainland China 7.3% 23.3% 69.4%
Beijing 15.79% 30.12% 54.09%
Shanghai 14.72% 19.8% 65.48%
Tianjin 8.24% 37.86% 53.9%
Chongqing 6.41% 24.66% 68.92%
Source: SGO, 2006: 122
Table 4: The reported proficiency in reading English among those who had studied English
Able to read
books and
periodicals
freely
Able to read
books and
periodicals with
the aid of
dictionaries and
other tools
Able to
understand
simple
reading
passages
Able to
understand
simple
sentences
Able to
recognise a
few words
Mainland
China
3.26% 12.67% 12.80% 43.23% 28.04%
Beijing 6.85% 21.89% 13.69% 31.59% 26.31%
Shanghai 7.61% 17.26% 12.69% 23.35% 39.09%
Tianjin 4.51% 21.81% 21.47% 29.15% 23.05%
Chongqing 4.37% 13.79% 11.62% 40.48% 29.74%
Source: SGO, 2006: 121
Table 3: The self-rated proficiency in spoken English of respondents who had studied English
Able to act as
interpreters on
formal occasions
Able to
converse
quite fluently
Able to conduct
daily
conversations
Able to say
some
greetings
Able to
utter a
few
words
Mainland
China
1.80% 3.53% 15.61% 61.54% 17.54%
Beijing 2.52% 6.25% 18.39% 59.92% 12.91%
Shanghai 2.03% 9.64% 14.72% 48.22% 25.38%
Tianjin 2.23% 8.19% 28.34% 50.43% 10.82%
Chongqing 0.59% 2.72% 18.49% 64.27% 13.93%
Source: SGO, 2006: 120
THE STATISTICS OF ENGLISH IN CHINA 13
China. According to Liu & Hu (1999), China rep-
resents a fruitful context for researchers at home to
evaluate research findings relating to second
language acquisition in a non-Chinese context
because it has the largest number of English lear-
ners in the world. Similarly, one may argue that
China, with its 390 million learners of English in
Mainland China alone, provides an excellent con-
text for the study of English as a global language
and research on world Englishes.
Two lines of inquiry deserve research priority.
The first concerns the needs for different foreign
languages in China (cf. Hu, 2011). In terms of
numbers of learners, English is set to remain the
first foreign language in China in the foreseeable
future, and it seems clear that more research is
needed in this field. The need for English and/or
other foreign languages in China has yet to be sys-
tematically investigated to the extent that informed
policy decisions regarding the educational pro-
vision of various foreign languages can be made.
The second line of inquiry pertains to documenting
foreign language information in a more compre-
hensive fashion. In addition to self-rated profi-
ciency data, other data including more on smaller
varieties, objective measures of proficiency and
longitudinal data concerning each foreign language
are needed (cf. Wen, Su & Jian, 2011). ▪
Note
1In our earlier paper (Wei & Su, 2008), we adopted the
percentage of 58.64% provided in SGO (2006: 324). We
believe the current percentage (48.72%) is more precise.
Therefore, in this paper the figures based on this current
percentage are an improved version.
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