With its booming economy and aspirations to expand its global influence, China may have achieved a victory in US classrooms.
Take the Chinese-American International School in San Francisco, which runs from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and offers instruction in all subjects -- from math to music -- half in Mandarin and half in English.
The curriculum also includes Chinese history, culture, and language studies, and in the 25 years since the school was founded, it has attracted mainly Asian-American children. But in the past few years, it has seen rapid growth in the enrollment of non-Asians.
For example, five years ago, the school was 57 percent Asian-American, but this year it is only 49 percent Asian-American, said Sharline Chiang, spokeswoman, adding that more non-Asian-Americans have been applying in recent years.
Andrew Corcoran, the head of the school, said that in the last three to four years, applications from white and Indian-American families have more than doubled, though he declined to give exact figures.
Chiang also said that this was the first year in which the pre-kindergarten class had more white children, 36 percent, than Asian-Americans, 32 percent.
School officials attribute the changes largely to a growing awareness of China as a global economic force, and to a strong sense among parents that learning Chinese could help their children professionally.
As Corcoran said, studying Chinese "is looked at as a long-term benefit."
Public schools
For similar reasons, Chinese language classes are increasingly popular across the country in public schools. Shuhan Wang, executive director of the Asia Society's Chinese Language Initiative, who has written about the growth of Chinese language studies in the US, said several states -- including Kentucky, Minnesota, Washington, Ohio, Kansas and West Virginia -- were developing curriculums for public schools.
Even so-called heritage schools, which have historically provided immigrant children with Chinese language and culture instruction on weekends and after public school, are gaining non-Asian students. For example, until three years ago, all but five or six of the roughly 120 students at the Chinese School of Delaware were Chinese-Americans who spoke Chinese at home, said Tommy Lu, the school's principal.
This year, nearly 30 students are non-Chinese, he said.
At the Lansing Chinese School in Michigan, also a heritage school, officials saw a wave of new interest about five years ago from US couples adopting babies from China, said Dennie Hoopingarner, the principal, so the school opened a preschool and created a curriculum for children who do not speak Chinese at home. Today, a third of the students, half of them non-Asian, take those classes, he said.
Hoopingarner said some non-Asian children attended the school because of "an ambitious feeling on the part of the parents" who are "interested in China's playing an important role in the world."
Parents are also starting new Mandarin programs when they cannot find them in their communities. Last year, in Livingston, New Jersey, Sharon Huang, a former marketing executive, founded a Mandarin-immersion preschool, Bilingual Buds, for her twin sons, who are now 3. Huang, whose husband is not Chinese, started the school in her home with 10 pupils and has since expanded it to 72 pupils and seven teachers in a rented space in a church. The school is considering adding a kindergarten class next fall, she said.
Judith Carlson, 41, a software consultant who lives in Verona, New Jersey, pays about US$400 a month to send Victoria, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, to Bilingual Buds. Carlson's older children, Ryan, 15, and Sarah, 13, have been studying Mandarin at their public school since first grade. The children are now teaching their parents to count to 10 and speak basic words in Mandarin.
"It's going to be a big advantage for them," Carlson said. "I think no matter what you do in life, if you have some kind of specialty that sets you apart from other people, that makes you more marketable."
Mandarin
When Mandarin was first offered in Chicago public schools in 1999, about 250 students enrolled, Bob Davis, director of the Chicago school system's Chinese Connections Program, said. Today, nearly 6,000 public school students, out of roughly 421,000, study Mandarin, he said, the majority black or Hispanic.
"I get calls every day from parents asking how they can get their students in the program, or how their local schools can offer such a program," Davis said, pointing out that "the bulk of our students have no background or exposure to Chinese language and culture."
In Connecticut this year, about 3,000 students, most non-Asian, are studying Mandarin in about 16 public schools, said Mary Ann Hansen of the state's Department of Education, a 10-fold increase from 300 students in 2004. Another half-dozen schools are considering offering Mandarin for the first time next fall, she said.
About half the teachers for the program come through a partnership with the Chinese government, Hansen added. Their salaries are paid by their own government, but the districts cover living expenses.
"We don't have enough Chinese teachers locally," she said.
Michael Patterson, a high school chemistry teacher, has four children -- ages 6 to 13 -- at the Chinese-American school here.
He said the academic program attracted him, but he also noted that "people say Chinese is going to be a pay-off."
Still, having children at this kind of school can be a challenge.
"We can't help with homework," Patterson said.
Chiang, the school's spokeswoman, said parents like Patterson gamely participated in celebrations like the Mandarin speech festival, public speaking contests in which students read in Mandarin.
"The parents sit and patiently listen," she said, "supporting their children even though they don't understand a word."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs