Chinese Pilots English
There IS a requirement to pass an English compentcy test to get a Chinese ATPL. I know because I had to do it even though I am British. The exam was produced by an Australian company and the instructions they receive during the exam have an Oz accent which is not a good start. As with all operations in a foreign language if the clearances and patter are standard then everything works out. Once you depart from that then the problems start.
English is a compulsary subject at primary school level and the standard depends on the profiency of the teacher. There are a large number of foriegn native English speakers employed by colleges whose sole job is to correct these faults and the standard of those students who put the effort in is very good.
Most of their overseas flights are to East Asian countries where there are local or western controllers who can understand Chinglish. In the Hong Kong area Chinese pilots are no better or worse than Phillipinos/Japanese/Indonesian/Korean/Indian/Portugese and the dozens of South Americans.
There is a possible scenario where the pilots in question could have got there licences before the exam was in existence. The they would be checked at company level and presumably like anywhere else a 747 crew into JFK would be fairly senior and nobody in the company is going to argue with them.
I do not have any recent experiance operating in the States but when I did I remember that a clearance would be delivered at Mach 2 in one breath.
Chinese aviation gets knocked at every oppotunity but believe me over the last decade it has improved beyond recognition. There is a staggering amount of traffic in China. Most cities have a modern airfield and terminal and in some cases they are building a second terminal building before the paint is dry on the first one. Shenzhen/Boan, the one that I am most familiar with has two massive terminal buildings and are now going to put in a second parallel runway. This is from nothing fifteen years ago.