Esperanto faces challenges in building a large speaker community in China, Yu Tao, secretary-general of All-China Esperanto League, said Tuesday at the ongoing 89th World Esperanto Conference.

Created in 1887, Esperanto is an Indo-European-based universal language designed to eliminate language barriers between nations. It was introduced to China in the early 1900s.

While its global speakers increased to over 10 million now, most of which are concentrated in Europe, its Chinese speakers shrank from 400,000 in the 1980s to 10,000 in 2004.

"There are much fewer Chinese Esperanto speakers than European ones. Besides, their language proficiency is also lower," Yu said, adding that Esperanto is far from a "universal language" in China.

The statistics show that only 10 percent of the 10,000 Chinese speakers can use the language to conduct in-depth discussion while 40 percent are only capable of daily conversation and the other 50 percent merely know several sentences.

Yu said it is because Chinese, based on the pictographic system, is much more different from Esperanto than European languages. The difference causes difficulties in learning Esperanto for Chinese people.

However, this conclusion can hardly explain why there is a nationwide mania for English, which is also a European language.

Hou Zhiping, former chief editor of a Esperanto magazine China Report, said the real reason is that there is no job demand for Esperanto speakers. In a time of rising unemployment it is hard to persuade people to learn a language merely for pleasure or cosmopolitanism ideal.

Yu believed that Esperanto may never prevail among the masses because learning it requires a good education background. "It is unrealistic to expect most Chinese people speak it. It will be only learned for leisure over a long period of time."

However, Hou said the European Union's adoption of Esperanto as a working language can create demand for its learners, which can be in turn transmitted to China and other countries by international business and conferences.