English teachers in China typically face two unfamiliar challenges: a vast crowd of students in a large lecture hall rather than a user-friendly group in a cozy seminar room; and an eerie silence every time he or she stops talking. "Hello?"

"HELLO?"

Nothing but shoe-shuffling, throat-clearing embarrassment. Attempts to break through the wall of Chinese reticence have instead broken the will of more than one would-be cultural ambassador. This is where entrepreneurial English teacher extraordinaire Li Yang comes in. Teachers attending his "Crazy English" lecture at Beijing Library near the end of August were treated to the improbable spectacle of hundreds of young Chinese people yelling out phrases such as "I'm so pleased to meet you" to the accompaniment of expansive hand and arm gestures. Teacher Li conducted them from the stage like a cross between a travelling medicine salesman and a stand-up comedian. Got a bad case of shyness? Li will cure you.

Li Yang dreamed up his "Crazy English" concept 10 years ago when he was busy failing almost everything in sight while studying mechanical engineering at Lanzhou University.

"I flunked 13 courses and almost got thrown out of the university," he recalls. After a couple of years of this, he decided it was time to do some serious thinking about his future.

"After a little investigation, I found that although millions of Chinese people are crazy on learning English, very few of them really succeed," says Li, "so finally I decided that probably English is something I can achieve something with."

Li's inability to concentrate made studying languages just as hard as studying engineering, so he invented a new technique: "In order to concentrate, instead of reading English, I yelled English." Li took to going outside and shouting the English phrases he was trying to learn at the top of his voice. Amazingly, this seemed to do the trick -- his transformation astounded his classmates, and within four months he had come second in a university English test.

However, Li says: "I was extremely introverted ... I felt very bad about myself. Self confidence is a serious problem for most Chinese people." Believing the best way to deal with this was to face his fear, Li decided to share his study techniques by giving a public lecture. After spending two days in his dormitory setting his ideas down, and overcoming a last-minute bout of stagefright, Li launched "Crazy English" on the world in Room 201 of Lanzhou University.

"Crazy" in Li Yang's sense doesn't mean insane. "'Crazy' means to do something with all of your heart, to do something with total involvement. 'Crazy' stands for a spirit ... you've got to be crazy in doing everything." He wants to change the passive attitude towards learning and encourage a positive approach to difficulties -- his most famous slogan is "Enjoy losing face."

On stage at Beijing Library, Li visibly struggles to squeeze his show into the confines of the space -- this is a performance designed for giant crowds in vast arenas. Li packs them in all over China: he regularly performs to 20,000 to 30,000 at a time, and set a personal best in Chengdu by sending 100,000 people "crazy" in the course of three shows in one day. "We call it 'new entertainment,'" says Li. "We combine rock 'n' roll with information sharing." He mixes up his comic/inspirational performance with video clips, rock music and taped language exercises, and gets the whole audience involved with group exercises.

It was a big hit with the young students. "He's very crazy," said Xiu Xue from the Dalian Institute of Light Industry. "His approach is very useful because Chinese people don't speak when they study English." Li Xuting from the Beijing Medical University agreed: "Li Yang makes us more active. In school we're not encouraged to participate like this." Yang Hui from Guangzhou, who has studied using Li Yang's method for four years, said, "His target is to use English, not to pass exams." Even older teachers more skeptical about the value of Li's methods conceded that he addressed a real and pressing problem in terms of both student attitudes and the education system as a whole. "The problem with Chinese students is that they study five years and at the end of it all they might be able to read and write English, but they can't say a thing," said Ye Huan, a retired teacher from the Medical College.

The Crazy English phenomenon has drawn fire from some quarters: often from people unnerved by its apparent assault on "traditional" values; sometimes from those who are simply suspicious of any kind of mass movement. "People in China so easily get aroused by a certain person and follow a certain trend," said one Beijing journalist. Li Yang feels this is unfair. "I will teach Chinese children to be proud of their country, proud of their mother tongue and proud of themselves." To criticisms that teaching English advances American "cultural imperialism," he retorts: "To just be proud of your own culture is selfish -- you've got to make your culture widespread, let people all over the world share the good points about your culture." Learning English, he says, is the way to make Chinese culture international.

Li also thinks of his enterprise as a "feel-good" venture. Much of the money generated by his lectures and teaching materials is used to further educational development in China. "We use education to support education," he says. "That's something unique ... We make money in big cities; we give it away in poor areas."

"You have to have passion, you have to do something," says Li. He claims to think a great deal about people who have died early, or who are handicapped, homeless or poor. Putting things in perspective this way helps him ignore fears of failure.

"Look at Princess Diana, John Denver ... They just died. They were much more important than me, they had much more money than me, but they just died. I think about these dead people. There's nothing to fear."