It is argued in this paper that national language capacity (NLC), with national foreign language capacity as its core component, is the foundation of national competitiveness. Our current national strategy calls for a structural reform of foreign language education, which is supposedly oriented to building NLC, in respect of minimizing low-quality repetition of foreign language teaching and adding strongly or potentially needed strategic (critical) languages to the repertoire of language fields.Diversifying foreign language education contributes to the elimination of unbalance of language fields and teaching quality of these languages, making it possible to meet the varied needs of foreign languages and to mobilize the whole society in building NLC.