If you’ve got a printer handy I recommend printing this one out. You’ll be glad you did. The piece comes from the The New Yorker, and mostly centers on a guy named Li Yang, who is a kind of English mogul in China. He’s something of a celebrity, and is known across China for his “Crazy English” schools and assorted sundries (texbooks, CDs etc.)

English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Truth be told it was in China that I first got the idea to move to Asia to teach English. Prior to that I was considering a Peace Corps placement in Senegal. One day my sister and I took a cab to the Great Wall. The taxi driver took us for free — because he wanted to learn English for the 2008 Olympic games. This was in 2003.

Li’s method is similar to TPR, or, Total Physical Response, which if you’ve ever had the pleasure of doing any post-grad language teaching methodology study you’ll recognize the term. However, Li adds another ingredient to the recipe — a heaping spoon of nationalism.

Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”

To hear the author explain it Li is something of a madman, who has built his empire not with a gimmick, but with hard work, which followed a pretty hard childhood. You might describe him as an Anthony Robbins type, except Robbins himself can’t keep up with Li.

Li’s indispensable asset is his voice, a full-throated pitchman’s baritone. He delivers it in an accent of his own creation that veers between Texan and Midwestern, stretched by roomy vowels. He has spent only a few weeks in the United States and Great Britain, but he makes few mistakes. He exudes the restlessness of a performer who has long since mastered his repertoire. Even among professional speakers, who market their indefatigability, he is known for a startling energy level. After Li appeared in Shanghai last fall, as an interpreter for the peak-performance coach Anthony Robbins, Robbins told me, “Usually, I do my translations through headsets and burn through two or three different translators in an hour and a half to two hours—I go onstage for about ten to twelve hours a day—but he lasted the entire day.” Robbins added, “It was really, really extraordinary.”

Anyway, like I said — print it out and step into Li’s world. This is a great read.