I have no idea about "deliberately", but I also experienced a far lower typical level of english than what I would have expected. In my former job I had regula

I have no idea about "deliberately", but I also experienced a far lower typical level of english than what I would have expected. In my former job I had regular meetings with japanese engineers, as my ex-company had contracted a big project to a big japanese company. I was fresh out of university (in germany), and expected that conversation in english for engineering projects was just standard thing and no big problems should arise. However in those meetings I unfortunately realized, that that's still not the case internationally. We had lots of meetings where the persons on the other end of the phone call could only read out their prepared slides and further discussion was not possible since our questions were not understood. Situations where we had to wait for 20 minutes for simple questions to be answered were also common. And often it was still not obvious after the answer if the other side really understood the question. So the best strategy was to create a written summary with very simply and direct language use afterwards and ask for confirmation again. That said things got better during the years, and least in my last regular meetings there were some (presumably younger) engineers and project managers on the other side with a solid level of english.