Wanbro points to a distressing China Daily item noting that China’s use of Esperanto is declining, and that the Esperanto gap between China and Europe is widening.:

"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.

Indeed, I’m puzzled. If anyone can think of a reason why English is more popular than Esperanto over here, please do leave a comment.

This is also troubling given China’s growing gap with Taiwan in the study of Yiddish.