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A spouse’s nagging or entrepreneurial vision - both reasonable motivators for starting a business. In this article, the author describes a growing English school in China. With more than one million students and an increasing need for English-speakers, schools such as these are fueling China’s more than $3 billion language training industry.

Yu Minhong attributes his decision to abandon a teaching career and go into business partly to his wife’s intense nagging.

“Some of my friends were making more money and my wife wanted me to be more successful. She felt that, compared with them, I was a loser,” he says with characteristic candour.

Mr Yu rose to the challenge, founding New Oriental and turning it into China’s biggest private education company, with English-language schools and other learning centres in 34 cities.

In the latest financial year, more than 1m students enrolled, boosting New Oriental’s revenues by 36 per cent to more than Rmb1bn ($136m).

The overwhelming majority of students come to New Oriental to learn English, often to prepare for an entrance exam to a US university. Increasingly, however, the incentive is simply to land a better job in China.

Mr Yu says: “If you look at a city such as Beijing, there’s an international event every day, so English speakers are clearly in great demand. And the Chinese people also know that, with English proficiency, they can probably double their salary immediately.”

The lure of a lucrative career has driven a rapid rise in education spending, which now accounts for about 15 per cent of China’s overall consumer spending, second only to food, according to JPMorgan.