English as a Lingua Franca: The Use of English in the Professional World in Mainland China

The rapidly-globalized economy of China has indicated that intercultural business communication between people from China and the rest of the world has been broadened and deepened (Du, 2015). However, in general, few empirical studies have been conducted on BELF in Mainland China (Wu, 2013) so that little is actually known on this issue. This presentation reports on the preliminary findings of investigating the communicative needs of using English (BELF) in the professional world in Mainland China. The study was conducted based on an online questionnaire survey with Chinese business professionals (N=102) working in the state-owned companies (N=35), privately-owned companies (N=25), or multinational companies (N=42) mainly in Shanghai (55.88%) and Guangzhou (17.65%). Those companies are specialized in a range of sectors, such as Communications, Engineering & construction, Financial services, International trade, and Logistics, etc. Several salient features regarding the use of English by Chinese business professionals at workplaces were identified: (1) it shows that there is a significant difference (p<0.05) in the percentage of using English vis-a-vis Chinese between the state-owned companies, privately-owned companies, and multinational companies; (2) the findings indicate that the frequency with which Chinese professionals need to communicate in English (both in written and spoken form) has increased across a range of communicative activities since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 ; (3) it is also found that certain forms of communicative activities such as faxes, which was identified as one of the major media in which English is used (Pang, Zhou, & Fu, 2002), is almost not used nowadays. On the other hand, new communicative forms such as instant messaging (e.g.: Wechat and QQ) has emgered as one of the frequently-used forms of written communication in English by Chinese professionals. The results of this survey are discussed with reference to the instruction of English for business communication and the workplace training of Chinese business professionals.