An update for 2017. Nothing has changed at this university, except they are desperate for overseas teachers. Nanchang has hit crisis point in recruiting overseas English teachers. This establishment is reduced to a few desperate foreign teachers, mostly from India and the Philippines.

Your informative post and the teacher shortage you pointed out made me think of something I read the other day:-

> Andrea Olinger, Hugh Bishop, Jose R. Cabrales, Rebecca Ginsburg,
Joseph L. Mapp, Orlando Mayorga, Erick Nava, Élfego Núñez, Otilio Rosas,
Andre D. Slater, LuAnn Sorenson, Jim Sosnowski, and Agustin Torres
New Voices
A program in which prisoners teach ESL classes, supported by volunteer teacher-trainers, is a
learning community with immense and sometimes unforeseen value.
The illustration by ESL teachers Agustin Torres and Erick Nava (Figure 1)
presents a classroom that is both typical and atypical of a classroom at a
community college or intensive English program. A teacher stands at the
chalkboard surrounded by characteristic classroom resources—a dictionary, newspa-
per, textbooks, and teacher’s manual—and a chart documenting scores on a literacy
test. Several students sit around a table, one looking bemused, one distracted, and
another happily engaged with reading material. In the background, however, gap-
ing holes in the walls reveal barbed wire, bricks of a cell wall, and barred windows.
The teacher and students wear button-down collared shirts hung with clipped-on
ID tags; the three individuals at the bottom don’t. A waiting list of students curls
from the upper left to the lower right, nearly touching an hourglass. Its sands have
just begun to fall.
These images derive from Language Partners, an ESL program offered at the
Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security men’s prison in central Illinois.
Danville Correctional Center houses a significant number of Spanish-speaking
men from Mexico with limited English proficiency. Before the introduction of
Language Partners in January 2011, the prison hadn’t offered an ESL class in over
five years due to budget cuts, making it difficult for these men to enter ABE and
pre-GED classes.
Seeing this need, Jose R. Cabrales, an incarcerated college student partici-
pating in the Education Justice Project (EJP) through the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), 1 developed a proposal for a tutoring program in
which EJP students would help interested prisoners improve their English skills.

I bet there's an awful lot of prison inmates studying ESL during their gaol terms. It would be nice if some westerners(retired) in China would show an interest and show the way for a few old lags to straighten out their lives and come to China to teach. We'd be helping to turn these souls away from crime and maybe keeping sober ourselves in the process. Everyone's a winner!!