Why not Silicon Valley, to show that China is mending relations with tech companies after its fight with Google? Why not Houston, home of Yao Ming? Why not New York? The answer is that Chicago has emerged as a clear, and unlikely, new favorite of the Chinese leadership. Seated at the head table on Wednesday was Mayor Richard Daley and his wife Maggie. Daley has gushed over the Chinese coming to town. “It is a big deal. Big, big, big, big. Big deal,” he said last week.
There are a few obvious reasons why Hu might go to Chicago: it’s the President’s home town; it’s the headquarters of Boeing, which just sold China $19 billion in airplanes; Illinois is also home to the U.S. operations of Wanxiang International, an auto-parts company that employs more Americans than any other Chinese company. But the deeper explanation involves how China has come to view the city differently than it did a few years ago. Five or six years ago, Chicago was still digging out from its old reputation among the Chinese as the home of Al Capone and Michael Jordan. The Beijing government could hardly care less about the place. In 2006, I watched Daley go have tea with Wang Qishan, who was then the mayor of Beijing and is now a vice-premier and top finance boss. Wang barely seemed to know who Daley was.
But Chicago was building America’s largest Chinese-language education program. There was nothing preordained about Chicago being home to a program of that scale. Rather, it was largely the work of a Chicago educator named Robert Davis, who had studied in China and returned to the city to discover that Chinese was not widely offered. Davis approached the school district, which hired him to start a broad-based program. Davis—whom I’ve known for a decade through China work—told me recently that the language program expanded abruptly after he had a chance encounter with Daley at a Chinese New Year event in 2004. “The next day I was called in to see the mayor,” Davis said. Chicago boosted spending on Chinese, won federal grants to hire teachers, and received money from the Chinese government to set up a Confucius Institute, a center for Chinese instruction, housed in a high school. Those centers—China’s answer to Germany’s Goethe Institut or the Alliance Française—have often stirred fears from critics that China would use them as Trojan horses to push a political line in foreign schools.
“There were certainly questioning voices and critics along the way, and there continues to be,” Davis, who now works as a liason with China for the U.S. College Board, said. “I was pretty aware of the things that people might be nervous about, or which would be potentially questionable, but [I] never encountered anything that we had to say no to or which was of a concern,” he added.
Today, Chicago has the largest Confucius Institute in the world, which Hu will visit this week. Since 2006, the Chinese government has donated roughly $1.6 million in funds and materials to Chicago schools. The city employs fifty-eight full-time Chinese-language teachers; they oversee twelve thousand public-school students learning Chinese. I’ve sat in on Chinese classes in poor neighborhoods, and I’ve seen how it compels students to see China as a plausible part of their lives. Most of those kids will never learn enough Chinese to make a career out of it, but that’s not the point. Those kids are growing up to believe, at least on some level, that China can be a part of their lives. And that is worth something.
Photograph: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy