Crazy English
Someone recently mentioned to me that I should see Yuan Zhang’s 1999 documentary “Crazy English.” Although the few reviews I’ve found of the film suggest that it could use some editing, the subject matter is fascinating: China’s first major self-help guru, Li Yang, whose gimmick is a new way of learning English. Namely, by shouting phrases out loud, quickly and repeatedly.
Li, essentially a motivational speaker, encourages his listeners to be self-confident and aggressive. “Study English well to promote world peace!” he shouts. “What is the most concrete way to love your country? To make yourself qualified for the twenty-first century, to make yourself strong mentally and physically, to make more money internationally—that’s the way to love your country.”
He leads his students in supposedly cathartic chants such as: “I enjoy losing face! I enjoy making money!” A self-made man, Li tells a group in Harbin, “Money is the biggest motivation for studying.” He preaches pragmatism, conformism and nationalism, citing General Colin Powell in front of one crowd to the effect that the “only touching story” is the one about “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.” With a group of soldiers atop the Great Wall he chants, in English: “Never let your country down! Never let your parents down! Never let yourself down! The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is great!”
A recent post on Pinyin News highlighted Li’s peculiar patriotism, as discussed in this Asahi Shimbun article:
The darling of China’s English-teaching world, Li considers himself a patriot, first and foremost.
“I promote the love-thy-country angle because I don’t want our people to forget China after they acquire English,” he explains. “I want them to use English and spread Chinese as a world language.”
But from what I can tell, it seems that self-confidence is the real product that Li is selling. Sophie Loras picks up on this in her interview with Li:
The key is that Li is not just selling a language: he’s selling a self-help venture based on what he says were the failings of his own parents. Born in Urumqi, Xinjiang Province in 1969, Li says the greatest failure of his parents and the Chinese schooling system in general was a culture of feeding children a lack of confidence.
It seems that Crazy English is now a successful company and brand name, employing over 150 people in East Asia.
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Comments
having been by LY’s side since 1997 and having produced all his 1999-2005 audio material, i totally agree with the “1st major self-help guru” and self-confidence quotes above; as far as the rest goes, his activity has to be understood in the local context, what most western journalists fail to do, their questions usually focused on the “how to get such massive crowds” angle, pretty irrelevant in this country… what is clearly obvious though is that LY has become the first Chinese to roam his land in such an extensive way, leaving no Jiangsu, Sichuan, Hube or Shaanxi remote countryside middle school unvisited. Far from the glossy magz interviews and 12 years on, LY still stands on shakily assembled desks in decrepit schoolyards 3 times a day, 90% of his time, when not teaching the nation’s top athletes and astronauts. and yes, teaching english has become a vehicle for the much needed confidence-building aspect. The awkward shy young man portrayed in the documentary is now a far cry from the man today, but that flame of devotion and passion in his eyes burns brighter with every student he meets. whatever the talks on the subject, the main problem now is how to handle the gap between their teachers’ vintage ’80s chinglish and the 10-16 y.o’s near-fluent english in this Channel [V] culture. So get babbling on that, all suggestions appreciated 
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Interesting. And not the worst approach to selling English I’ve ever heard, either. At least once a year I find myself reminding a giggling group of teenagers that, simply in terms of numbers, Japanese women are a fair bit ‘weirder’ than hairy, English speaking white guys. When this sinks in I tell them that the real reason I’d like them to learn English is not for work or travel, but so a Japanese point of view can begin to be better articulated in the international arena. Appealing to cultural chauvinism is an excellent way to build interest, at least among some of my students. By no means all, of course.