Future Now
The IFTF Blog
new friends for China, new U.S.-Sino p2p cooperation
A new kind of American is beginning to engage with China. It seems to me that China is beginning to feel easier, closer, more important and more meaningful all at once, to new kinds of people—not academics, not young people who want to travel and live someplace far away from home, and not traditional expats taking a hardship position in a multinational company. There are two new groups of Americans who are making significant investments of time and energy in learning about China and living in China. Their collective efforts are creating a broad platform for much richer cross-cultural exchanges in the future. I believe that the relationships now being built will lead pretty quickly, say in the next 5-10 years, to an unprecedented level of U.S.-Sino p2p cooperation in the arts, business, education, and manufacturing.
The first group: Successful, non-Chinese speaking 40- and 50-something people at the top of their professional games. Recent stories I’ve heard include a venture capitalist and a VP of a major multinational consumer products company, both of whom moved their entire families to China to basically start a new life, mid-career. Another is CEO of a marketing and communications company, who took a month out of his life to go to China and start learning Mandarin, a notoriously difficult language, in order to set up a Shanghai office. Two of these three are ethnic Chinese.
The second group: the estimated 50,000-and-growing American kids of all ethnic backgrounds who are learning Mandarin in elementary and high schools across the country. College Mandarin enrollment has jumped significantly in the last decade: according to Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Modern Language Association, 2007, Chinese-language enrollment at the university level went from a 20% increase between 1998 and 2002, to a 51% jump in 2006. But even more striking is the growth in Mandarin language training offered by public and private primary and elementary schools. Nationwide, by the end of 2007 there were Chinese programs in more than 550 elementary, junior high and senior high schools, a 100% increase in two years, according to The Asia Society, an educational group. Organizations like the Kansas Committee for International Education in the Schools are recommending longterm state goals for Mandarin training: by 2016 they would like to make Chinese one of the three most-offered languages in Kansas public schools. 35 Chicago public schools offer Mandarin, 22 of them elementary schools. Another 30 schools are on a waiting list for such programs.
Put these two groups together and you begin to see an American population that is more informed on mainland China than at any other time in our history. More of us will be able to read and speak the language; more will have personal histories and professional experiences that are tied to China. This is going to be the foundation for a whole new set of intellectual, manufacturing, commercial, and artistic relationships for us here in the U.S. that will play out over the next several decades. Pretty exciting stuff.