The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing was probably the most effective foreign propaganda campaign of any country since the end of the Cold War. The timing couldn’t have been better for the Chinese Communist Party; just a few weeks after the closing ceremonies, the financial services firm Lehman Brothers, a fixture on Wall Street since its founding in 1850, collapsed, plunging developed economies into a yearslong recession from which some never fully recovered.
Before the games, the Chinese put up posters promoting feel-good, liberal aphorisms that mirrored much of what you’d find in the halls of a liberal arts college, luring in a gullible press and the wide-eyed managerial class.
“One World, One Dream,” read one, encapsulating a two-year Olympic effort to mesmerize the world. It wasn’t cheap, either, with an estimated price tag of $43 billion. The 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, for comparison, cost $13.2 billion, in what many analysts deemed a financial catastrophe.
A glamorous performance of choreographed dance during the games’ opening presented not only an alternative to the Western system, but an inevitable replacement. No doubt looking to refurbish the authoritarian communist state’s poor image at the time, the Chinese at least put on a flashy show. In the lead-up to the games, questions surrounded whether France would attend because of China’s treatment of Tibetan protesters. Then-President Nicholas Sarkozy threatened to boycott the games, although he later backpedaled and canceled a Paris meeting with the Dalai Lama to attend the opening ceremony.
Just a year before, my public high school had begun a Mandarin class trial program as an alternative to the more traditional French, Spanish, and Latin. That program was expanded at the beginning of the 2009 school year to a four-year curriculum. The Darien Board of Education, which oversees one of the nation’s wealthiest school districts, believed it was time to begin preparing its children for an inevitably Chinese-dominated economy. The economic anxiety of Darien families, who were at the time facing historically low Wall Street bonuses and collapsing property values, certainly played a part.
Our future bankers and executives needed to be prepared, parents surmised. Besides, imagine the kind of foresight it would communicate on a college application to Yale!
It was that same fall that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times penned his “Our One-Party Democracy,” which lauded the “reasonably enlightened group of people” governing China. The Chinese Communist Party was leading the future on green energy, while congressional Republicans’ obstinance to President Barack Obama’s plan was unacceptable enough to make a supposed international affairs expert question the concept of liberal democracy altogether.
“The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier, and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer,” Friedman quoted global trade consultant and former columnist for the Globalist Edward Goldberg as saying. “In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
Welcoming China’s rise and economic domination was a somewhat bipartisan affair, despite Goldberg’s pronouncements. In 2007, Jim Rogers, a libertarian hedge fund manager and partner of George Soros, moved his entire family to Singapore. His daughters became fluent in Mandarin.
“If you were smart in 1807, you moved to London. If you were smart in 1907, you moved to New York City. And if you are smart in 2007, you move to Asia,” he said at the time.
This elite trend continues in the open. Darien High School began offering summer classes in Mandarin in 2015, where full-time teachers can expect an annual salary of nearly $89,000, far more than those in the Spanish department.
Even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump hired a Mandarin-speaking nanny. Their oldest daughter, Arabella, was able to sing the Chinese “Happy New Year” song nearly fluently in 2017 in a video posted on Instagram that was reminiscent of how parents used to have home videos of their child learning to ride a bike.
It’s hard to imagine any comparable elite consensus forming so quickly, particularly when it comes to how one raises his or her children. Few elite parents, for example, ever championed Spanish classes as an essential tool to compete in the international marketplace. And how many told their children struggling over math homework that they’d never get a job if they can’t memorize the relationships between the six trigonometric functions?
Many in this class viewed China’s ascendence as a fait accompli, an inevitability due to historical forces that can be roughly traced to the past 30 years. Even so, we don’t see parallel behavior during the Cold War. Perhaps out of responsible skepticism about the Marxist claim of inevitable global socialism, few Americans scrambled to teach their children Russian.
The better analogy may be Japan’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s, where the island nation skyrocketed to become the second-wealthiest country, as measured by GDP.
Although America did see record growth in Japanese language classes taught in certain public schools, the study of Chinese today is unparalleled. More schools offering Chinese language classes today are assessed for proficiency than those offering Spanish, according to a 2017 study done by the American Councils for International Education. Over 227,000 high schoolers are taking Chinese language classes, compared to the all-time 1992 peak of Japanese enrollment of 45,000.
Nor would any daughter of the president of the United States feel comfortable boasting about how her children were learning the language to prepare them for the job market. Instead, rising to the implicit challenge posed by the Japanese economic “miracle” became a question of national pride for Americans, not one of resignation and acceptance.
“We’ve been running up the white flag when we should be running up the American flag,” Walter Mondale said in 1982, testing attack lines for his eventual presidential run. “What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?”
Of course, Mondale would later lose in his challenge against Ronald Reagan in 1984. But his words spoke of a consensus position: This country will not be overtaken.
Despite the mythos of Reagan as a free-trade, free-market champion, his administration repeatedly pressured Japan to limit a number of its exports. In 1985, he signed the Plaza Accord, which depreciated the U.S. dollar against the Japanese yen and Deutsche mark, boosting U.S. manufacturing, at least temporarily.
Japan’s economy tanked shortly after that, while America enjoyed record economic growth. Every child wouldn’t need to learn Japanese, after all.
Economic nationalists and free-trade skeptics point to the admission of China into the World Trade Organization as the start of today’s unusual cultural shift, often condemning the move as an elite betrayal of ordinary Americans. But polling at the time shows a clear majority of Americans approved of China’s entry.
A Gallup survey taken in 1999, shortly after the trade accord was signed, found 54% of the American public favoring the deal. In May 2000, after the House of Representatives passed HR 4444, a bill permanently normalizing trade between the U.S. and China, 56% of the public wanted the Senate to send it to President George Bush’s desk.
The counterargument to this reality is that Americans didn’t know what they were genuinely signing up for with China. These numbers, according to critics, were due to big business manipulating public opinion through promises of cheap products. At the same time, the economic and strategic downsides wouldn’t be apparent before it was too late for correction.
Over 20 years later, a China-born pandemic has dramatically shifted public opinion. A Harris poll released earlier in April found that 77% of the U.S. public blames China for the coronavirus outbreak, with 71% agreeing that American companies should pull back manufacturing from the country.
Nearly the same proportion, 69%, says it now supports President Trump’s trade policies against China. It’s a significant shift; in September 2019, 58% said they believed Trump’s trade war with China would be harmful to the U.S., with 63% predicting it would be bad for the economy. According to Pew, 66% of the American public now has an unfavorable view of China, up significantly from the 47% who did just two years ago.
Many of those who embraced Mandarin education for their children may face the blowback of any significant changes in how the U.S. conducts business with China. Chinese language specialists will no longer be as necessary for overseeing supply chains, and Wall Street’s Asian trading and lending divisions would likely shrink dramatically.
Of course, that doesn’t mean our national security services won’t have use for all Mandarin speakers. Still, the allure of working a government job with pay caps won’t compete with the former promises of six-figure bonuses and a house in suburban Connecticut.
Does this mean being fluent in Mandarin will constitute little more than a party trick or a way for Chinese Americans to maintain their ancestral culture? Perhaps. At the very least, the children of wealthy suburbanites may get an entertaining Instagram video out of it.
Joseph Simonson is a Washington Examiner political reporter.
