China Pushes Back Against English Language

There is a movement afoot in China to strip English language of its status by dropping the English language requirement from the Gaokao (China's national higher education entrance examination). Typical reaction:

How many Chinese have been hurt by the English education? It should have been abolished long ago. English is a language and should be studied as such. But Chinese students force themselves to remember the English vocabularies as imprinted signs for exam purposes...

The problem, as far as I understand it, is not with spoken English, which is actually quite simple and quite useful for communicating with people around the world. The problem is with English being taught as a written language, forcing Chinese students to memorize thousands of arbitrary sequences of Latin characters of which written English is composed. By a standard measure of phoneme-grapheme correspondence, English spelling is less than 1% phonetic, compared to 99% for Spanish and Italian, 95% for Russian and 90% for German.

Perhaps the Beijing Municipal Education Commission and China's Intelligence Research Academy would enjoy taking a look at Project Unspell. Why make students attempt to decipher spelled English when they can achieve the same results by learning 39 new characters and using a piece of software?