by Greg T. Spielberg

Come the first day of school, roughly 600 Oakland County (Mich.) students will be tossing Chinese textbooks into their backpacks on the way to class. Over the past two years, the number of high schools offering Chinese has jumped from four to 23 out of the 28 districts in this Detroit-metro county. Seventh-grade social studies has been refocused from Eastern Hemisphere to contemporary China and “its emerging role in the world,” says Jackie Moase-Burke, the language consultant for Oakland Schools. These students are part of the growing number nationwide – from Chicago and Ohio to Washington D.C. and New Jersey – that should be able to translate “Welcome back to school” to “欢迎回到学校” by year’s end.

There are an estimated 50,000 Chinese-language students in the United States according to the Teachers of Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages Web site, a tenfold increase since 2000. In Oakland County, educators and local government are working together to promote a bi-lingual school experience – one that better positions students to interact with the world’s largest emerging market. “More and more, education and workforce development has been critical to business development,” says Chuck Holmes of the Oakland County Department of Economic Development.

The trend is not just in southeast Michigan. It’s nationwide. “There has been a sea change,” says Steve Ackley, spokesman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Nationally, Chinese programs in the US saw heavy growth, increasing 200% between ’04 and ’08. Nine years ago, the group’s national survey of America’s schools did not even include Chinese as an answer option (the language was part of “other.”) The council estimates that 5000 schools taught the language.

This significant uptick has been aided by China’s flourishing economic gravity, but also through assistance by both nation’s governments. In 2006, President Bush kicked off the $114 million National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), a program meant to increase America’s fluency in “critical” languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Russian and others. The NSLI provided funding for students seeking to learn strategically important languages, and with international relations dominated by the Middle East, Arabic was the overwhelmingly popular choice.

Thomas Farrell, former secretary of the State Department’s academic programs, says the fund (which also provides grants for teachers) was influenced by changing global economics as well. “I do think the impact that we were all experiencing – China’s economic impact and India’s economic rise – had a lot to do with the initiative.”

Since then, Chinese has greatly outstripped Arabic as America’s second language. A major reason for the speed with which Chinese is moving across the continent is Hanban, or the Chinese Language Council International. Officially defined as a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, Hanban is financed by the state and in turn has sponsored a noticeable portion of the States’ language renaissance. Chinese Language Council International sponsors trips for American teachers and administrators to visit China, pays for Chinese textbooks and finds Chinese teachers for American schools having trouble pulling a qualified instructor from the local area. Hanban also funds teacher-training programs for non-native speakers looking to sharpen their fluency.

Ackley, who’s attended the World Language Expo for the past half-decade says he started noticing the Hanban presence three years ago. The cultural promotion is part of a soft diplomacy meant to increase the country’s influence abroad. China recently began broadcasting its China Central Television satellite channel into the Middle East and seeks to do the same in the US.

In domestic public and private schools, Hanban is influencing Chinese-language teaching. More than 35 of the 350 or so private schools in the country source the group to find them qualified teachers through a program called China Connection. A Birmingham, Ala., school wanted to start an Associated Placement program but lacked the talent base (only 1% of the city’s population is Asian, much less Chinese).

“The program really allowed the school to begin where they may not have been able to otherwise,” says National Association of Public Schools Spokeswoman Myra McGovern, adding that less than a tenth of America’s private schools relied on Hanban to find teachers.

Galal Walker, director of the National East Asian Languages Resources Center at Ohio State University, manages his relationship with Hanban “tenderly.” The center’s mission is to bring Chinese language teaching into the mainstream but Walker says Hanban has frequently bordered on proselytizing for its country rather than helping to properly instruct Ohio students. He credits Hanban for becoming more efficient, pointing out that the relationship is a work in progress. For the state, there’s been rapid development. Five years ago, Ohio had seven schools teaching Chinese. Now there are 70 districts with more than 100 schools.

Proselytizing or efficient management, the results are starting to become apparent to Walker. “I spent 25 years saying we should pay attention to the Chinese, and now I sit in my office and get 25 calls from people who say we should be paying attention to the Chinese,” he says.

Many thanks to Greg T. Spielberg for contributing this article. Greg is fresh off an eight-month internship at BusinessWeek where he worked on reader engagement and as a reporter. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and the University of Missouri. His journalism passions are building community and writing about the economic implications of cultural change.

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