I'm in a swish conference hall, a nervous teacher in front of a sea of strange faces. Everyone looks attentive enough. But though I've faced many a class of fidgety 15-year-olds on dull Fridays, this audience is much more daunting. More than 100 influential Chinese business people and government big-wigs - even a general - are assembled in a five-star Beijing hotel to hear me urge Chinese students to come to British schools and universities.

Going to China to promote British education sounds straightforward. After all, everyone's doing it these days. London's Dulwich College has opened "branches" in Shanghai and Beijing; Nottingham University is building a £40m campus in Ningbo. For 30 years, Chinese students have attended British schools and universities: about 50,000 are currently studying here, paying £550m into British purses. University courses such as engineering and medicine are especially popular, as are prestigious private schools such as Roedean and Charterhouse.

But facing such a distinguished audience from behind a podium makes you less confident in Europe's power to impress. Most historic British schools, like my own, Sherborne, stretch back 500 years: a mere blip in China's 5,000-year-old history. Does the nation that gave us Confucius and Lao-Tse really need AS levels and GCSEs?

Fairly swiftly, as the first sweat breaks, I discover one of the main cultural differences. Back home, most teachers use humour, a few light jokes, to break down barriers between speaker and audience. Here, such an approach is taboo - it would demean the seriousness of the subject matter. So, apart from a faint ripple of polite applause at the end, my 15-minute carefully prepared pitch ("In Britain we truly believe we have some of the best schools in the world") is met with stony silence. No laughter, no reactions at all. Disconcertingly, there's no taboo about mobile phones going off in the middle of speeches and several times distracting ring-tones sound and new conversations start. Every so often I have to slow down to let the interpreters catch up.

At the end of each session, every speaker in our delegation tries to open up the floor to questions. There aren't any. Each speech, dull or inspired, is met with the same lack of response. In fact it's the toughest audience I've faced.

Yet despite the shaky hands and dry mouth, despite the worries over wrong slides, it's an inspiration simply to be here. There's a long tradition of respecting and honouring teachers in China. Even at university level, the system is based on quiet attention, rather than questioning. As Dr Christopher Greenfield, author of the recent book on overseas students, World Class, puts it: "In China, teachers are like gurus, respected and not challenged - their superior knowledge is assumed." How refreshing, one thinks, remembering Form 5C.

Chatting informally with some of the guests afterwards, it soon becomes clear that, despite some slackening of interest in British universities (as reported recently in the FT), China's growing middle classes value education so much they are certainly prepared to pay for it. In fact, education has long been seen as a way of improving a person's worth and career. As one successful Chinese architect said to me: "Parents will not mind spending, as they can see the benefits. Education is big business. It's an investment." It's humbling too to converse with young Chinese executives, all speaking near-perfect English, many with degrees at our top universities: like Will, who has just finished an MBA at Oxford, funding himself and paying a small fortune in the process.

Given this kind of commitment, you start to wonder whether a British education is worth all the effort. As another businessman, whose daughter has just left Malvern College (annual fees: £22,000), observes: "She loved it in Britain but your schools and colleges cost too much." It dawns on you too that Britain's educational relationship with China has been too one way. What happened to the old idea of the "exchange"? An effortlessly bilingual entrepreneur politely reminds me: "It's not just a question of you teaching us - we have plenty to teach you, with our language, our medicine, our culture and our calligraphy."

He's right. China started its first system of state education, based on Confucian teachings, under the Han Dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago. In AD 105, paper was invented: 17 centuries before Dr Johnson, a 9,000 character dictionary compiled. The first exam system was set up back in 638. Beijing has about 100 thriving universities, state and private alike. The two city-centre schools I visited seemed safe, happy places: full of purpose, with friendly teachers and contented kids playing basketball.

With the new policy of promoting Mandarin in British and American schools and with China's economy booming, why assume we have all the answers? I arrived in China, thinking my job was easy: to sell the wonders of a British boarding education, its broad curriculum, the music, the drama, all the sport it offers. I left thinking it might be more beneficial instead to bring some of our teenagers to China for a few months, in language and cultural exchanges. Rather than educating the Chinese, this teacher had learned a few lessons himself.

Dr Andrew Cunningham works and teaches at Sherborne School