Should Chinese schools demote English as a core subject?

A teacher’s call to end ‘worshipping foreign things’ reignites debate over the language’s role in schools

Calls to reduce English’s status as a core subject in China’s education system have resurfaced after an internet-famous maths teacher urged the country to end “worshipping foreign things”.

The controversy has revived a long-running debate over the role of English in Chinese schools.

The argument came to life again after Tang Jiafeng, a maths teacher known for coaching students through the national postgraduate entrance exam, said on social media that children, parents and schools had devoted disproportionate amounts of time and resources to English, a subject he argued had little relevance to the jobs most people eventually did.

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“I publicly call for English to be stripped of its status as a core subject,” Tang wrote on Saturday. “No country in the world places English in such a supreme position as we do.”

He argued that Chinese children were being pushed to cram in English before they had even mastered their own language, despite the country’s thousands of years of civilisation.

“English is just a tool. It is enough to know how to use it,” Tang said. “The history of Chinese people worshipping foreign things and fawning over foreigners should end!”

His remarks came after history was reduced in weight as a subject in local exam reforms, a decision he said left him “heavy-hearted”.

History lessons helped students remember the hardships of earlier generations and develop sound values, Tang said, adding that if any subject deserved to be assigned less weight, it should be English rather than history.

At present, English is a core subject in China’s basic education system, alongside Chinese and mathematics. In the traditional 750-point structure of the gaokao, the national college entrance examination, each of the three subjects is worth 150 points.

While the weighting and assessment of other subjects have been reshaped in recent years as part of reforms to the gaokao and the zhongkao – the national high school entrance examination – the three subjects have stayed central to China’s exam-oriented education system.

Meanwhile, history has seen its prominence diminished in some recent local reforms, with fewer and fewer students choosing to study it as a gaokao elective.

Not everyone agreed with Tang.

Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin said those who denounced English learning as “worshipping foreign things” and sought to remove it as a core subject were “extreme”, “narrow-minded” and using nationalist rhetoric to portray their position as patriotic and morally justified.

Also taking to social media on Saturday, Hu said English should remain a core subject because it could give students access to international knowledge and opportunities across a range of fields.

Weakening English in basic public education could undermine educational equality, he added, saying that wealthier families would still be able to pay for private English education while students from less privileged backgrounds would lose access to the same opportunities.

“Basic education should leave everyone room to advance as far as they possibly can,” the former editor said. “This is not about ‘worshipping foreign things’; it is about educational equality at the starting point of real life.”

English’s global dominance reflected the West’s historical lead in modernisation, Hu said, and Chinese would naturally gain influence as the country kept ascending.

He warned that trying to “accelerate that shift through administrative measures” or nationalist rhetoric could backfire and stir “unnecessary ideological controversy”.

Calls to cut English’s weight in the gaokao have surfaced in recent years.

In the past few editions of the “two sessions” – China’s largest annual political gathering – some political advisers and lawmakers have proposed reducing English’s score in the exam, dropping its core-subject status and making it an elective.

The debate has intensified alongside growing confidence in China’s economic and technological standing.

Supporters of demoting English often invoke growing “cultural confidence”, saying the expanding global use of Chinese, combined with advances in AI translation, reduce the need for such intensive English-language education.

Others question the effectiveness of China’s heavily exam-oriented approach to English teaching, saying students could spend years memorising vocabulary and grammar for tests without developing an ability to communicate confidently in real-life situations. The phenomenon is often described in China as “mute English”.

The 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, an annual ranking of adult English skills based on test results in 2024 from more than 2.2 million people worldwide, placed China 86th out of 123 countries and regions – in the “low proficiency” category.

The content of English teaching itself has also shifted, according to some critics, with Chinese textbooks and classrooms placing greater emphasis on Chinese history, culture and domestic achievements, and less on Western society and international culture.

The changes undercut one of the original purposes of learning a foreign language, which was giving students a window to the outside world, they said.