I have been writing and emailing Oregon state legislators for more than one year urging them to increase Mandarin programs in Oregon. This is the email I sent them 10/15/07.
Dear Oregon State Senator/Representative,
The issue is China, and whether Oregon is preparing for the challenges and opportunities that a rising China will pose over the next fifty years? Does not Oregon have a high priority strategic interest in developing more Mandarin programs for our K-16 students and sending many of them to study in China? Such programs would be good for economic development, national security and world peace. How much will all the other public investments you are making be worth if the US goes to war with China in the future for lack of investment in these programs now? Please prepare our next generations to meet the China challenge.
The following two articles support the importance of China in Oregon’s future.
Reed Hunt, former FCC Chair and author of the book "In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship," wrote the following "In China’s Shadow" opinion article for the Denver Post (10/28/06):
All Americans are living their lives in the shadow of China's rising economic power. China is now to the United States what the United States was to Europe in the 19th century: the world's biggest new market in terms of consumption and production and the place where standards of living are rising most quickly. China is the birthplace of firms with a chance to take leadership in every sector of the global economy.
The Europeans failed to meet the American challenge. Whether the United States meets the challenge of China is not determined by fate, but rather by our willingness to reform the structures of law, technology and leadership in the ways necessary to encourage entrepreneurship in energy, health care and every other sector of the economy.
Let's look at how long China's shadow already is and will become.
The Chinese are the world's No. 1 consumers by units of refrigerators, televisions and cellphones. China is first in the world in Internet users under the age of 30. More than 300 million Chinese - roughly a quarter of the population - have just moved or will soon move from rural to urban China and in doing so will create within 20 years an urban consumer middle class with purchasing power equal to that of Japan, the world's second-biggest economy. In a generation, the buying power of China will shape much of the tastes, trends and technological choices of the world's sellers of goods and services......(for full article see here)
Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World," writes an op-ed article "China doesn’t own the future" in the LA Times (10/14/07):
The conventional wisdom is that China is rising and the United States is on its way down. According to this view, the 21st century challenge for U.S. foreign policy is to manage our inevitable decline as gracefully as possible as the new superpower of the East reaches for the stars.
The conventional wisdom almost always sounds smart -- and is almost always wrong. The U.S. doesn't need to contain China, and it doesn't need to fight China either. Nor does it need to prepare to gracefully let China replace the United States as the world's leading power.
The first reason is simple. The rise of China is only part of a much bigger story -- the rise of Asia. China isn't ascending in a vacuum, destined to dominate its region the way the U.S. dominates the Western Hemisphere -- or the way Germany once tried to dominate Europe.
China is rising, but so is India. So are Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea (where South and North may be united before too much longer). Japan will remain a powerful economic, military and technological force for the foreseeable future. Taiwan is not sinking into the sea; Australia is prospering as never before. Bangladesh is beginning to industrialize; even Myanmar, or Burma, may possibly follow the road to prosperity through global economic integration that has made East and South Asia growth rates the envy of the world....
Promoting the peaceful development of Asia, ensuring that smaller countries are not threatened by their large neighbors and helping the Asian superpowers to find a set of economic and security relationships that can keep the region peaceful as it passes through the greatest economic and social transformation in world history -- those should be the goals of U.S. policy in Asia this century.
If we get that right, and if we preserve the social dynamism at home that is the basis of our global role, we will promote the rise of democracy and prosperity in Asia and build a better world for the future.
(for full article see here)
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With less than 1% of Oregon high school students and less than 2% of Oregon State University, Portland State University and University of Oregon students studying Mandarin, Oregon is not preparing its next generations for the challenges ahead. The responsibility for change is yours!