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Despite these years of experience in the country, I do not regard myself as an expert on China, or “an old China hand”. I am certainly not an apologist for the Chinese government or its policies, though I have enjoyed and reciprocated much friendship and mutual respect here.

Last summer I was asked if I would join a select group of Chinese and international teachers from Beiwai to teach a group of senior government officials at the China National School of Administration. The course – intensive English training program 3 was an immersion language program designed to assist officials to communicate in English during their representational duties as vice-ministers or vice-governors, first initiated in 2001 by the then vice-premier Li Lanqing, and now continued under the sponsorship of Li Yuanchao, minister of the Party’s organization department.

If you had asked me before last September whether I would enjoy teaching a group of senior government officials, I would probably have given a guarded answer: “I don’t have to enjoy students. Teaching is my job, and I teach all students with as much professional competence as I possess.” If you had persisted further and asked me whether I thought I would actually respect and like such a group, honesty would have forced me toward skepticism.

Westerners have a generally cynical view of politicians, and here in China sometimes the phrase “officials” is more often described with adjectives like “greedy” and “corrupt” than “sincere” or “diligent” in some newspapers. I did not expect to be touched at the emotional level by a group of trainees at the National School of Administration.

Three months on and I feel ashamed at my previous cynicism and prejudice. I think I have learned more about China and the Chinese in the last three months than I had in the previous 10 years as a teacher in China.

When you live and work in close proximity with a group of people, you learn a great deal about them. Sharing three meals a day, teaching and discussing in small groups, holding one-on-one tutorials, attending banquets and cultural events together gives you insights into individuals that normal university lecturing never can.

It exposes you to the full spectrum of their personalities, and you are able to make judgments about things like honesty and sincerity that you would not be able to make about students that you meet only once or twice a week.

The group comprised 12 individuals who were as varied and distinct from each other as you would expect from people gathered together from all over China.

One characteristic that was shared by them all, however, was motivation – enormous, intense, 15-hour-a-day motivation to work hard and learn English.

And this motivation was itself driven by a genuine desire to develop their language skills not for reasons of personal satisfaction alone but because they sincerely believed it would make them better able to serve the people of their beloved province and enhance the image of the China of which they are so proud. I was not mistaken in this, and I found it admirable.

I also found myself liking them enormously. When you come to admire people for their working habits and respect them for their moral positions, affection follows closely behind.

I think my fellow foreign expert and I were privileged to gain an insight into the quality of some of the people who govern China in a way that only a few foreigners share, and that the West in general is completely ignorant of. These were valuable men and women. They were cultivated and honorable, diligent and sincere. They represented truly the ideal of the good public official.

Furthermore, in being privileged to meet ex-vice-premier Li Lanqing and Minister Li Yuanchao, and to listen to them discuss – in excellent English – the importance of learning a foreign language in order to represent more accurately to the world the true character of China, I came to a closer understanding that this belief in education for its ministers is a central tenet of the Chinese government.

They demand excellence in their officials, and they are prepared to invest heavily in it. There is no analogue to this practice in Western democracy that I know of. I think China is the stronger for it, and the West the weaker for its absence.

Indeed, I think China is the more democratic by virtue of this training of its officials, because they have a very real sense of and belief in their role as representatives of the people. The West is skeptical of such beliefs, where it knows of them, but is generally in ignorance of them. The skepticism is a possible weakness in Western understanding, while the ignorance is a possible weakness in Chinese public relations.

I firmly believe that the communication skills gained by the trainees during the course will contribute to a better understanding of China in the West, and a better understanding of the West in China. I feel honored to have been a very small part in such a momentous process.

The author is a British teacher living in China

I once employed a young chinese computer programmer. One day at lunch I asked him about the Falun Gong. He immediately blurted out “Falun Gong very very bad”. I suddenly became aware of how programmed by his government he was! In the US, religious and political fringe elements are tolerated and rarely given a second glance. In China, if the Hu or the Wen says “Wut” then everybody says “Where” and “How”?