DISCUSSION
GROUP
January 4, 2013
Tom Watkins LEARN CHINESE!
Could Governor Snyder follow Brooks Patterson’s lead and call for the teaching of Chinese in all
Michigan schools? Governor Snyder could catapult Michigan forward in his State of the State (SOS) address by calling for the teaching of Chinese history, culture and language in all of our
schools. The reinvention of Michigan may well require that students learn Chinese and much more about China, the “Middle Kingdom.”
Radical? Absolutely. Yet this initiative would help place Michigan on the global map, making our state an economic magnet for Chinese direct investment to prepare our children for the hyper-competitive, disruptive, transformational, knowledge-based economy where ideas and jobs now move effortlessly across the globe.
We would be wise to learn more about China or, as they have called themselves dating back thousands of years, “Zhongguo,” the “Middle Kingdom”. Michigan may be two beautiful peninsulas, but we are not an island. China and America have two disparate cultures. Our relationship with China will grow increasingly critical and complex in the future. How we manage this relationship will impact not only the people of our respective countries, but all of humanity.
Moving forward, all major global issues will intersect at the corner of America and China. As a state and nation, we need to do much more to prepare our children to be global citizens. We cannot do so by ignoring the Chinese –one-fifth of all the people on the planet!
China certainly has a series of serious, internal and external challenges that it must address as the 21st century matures. Fueled with 1.3 billion people and a keen desire to regain the top perch it held throughout most of history, China is once again a nation on the move. At the 2011 Munk Debates — Canada’s international debate series on public policy (www.munkdebates.com) — NiallFerguson, author, leading historian and biographer of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, squared off against CNN’sFareed Zaharia, world-renowned economist David Daokui Li and Henry Kissinger himself. This is what Mr. Ferguson had to say about China’s rise:
“I believe the 21st century will belong to China because most centuries have belonged to China. The 19th and 20th centuries were the exceptions. Eighteen of the last twenty centuries saw China as, by some margin, the largest economy in the world.China is more of a continent than a country. A fifth of humanity lives there. It is forty times the size of Canada. If China was organized like Europe it would be divided into ninety nation-states…in thirty years China’s economy has grown by a factor of nearly ten, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently projected that it will be the largest economy in the world in five years’ time. It has already taken over the United States as a manufacturer and as the world’s biggest automobile market. And the demand for cars in China will increase by tenfold in the years to come …it used to be reliant on foreign direct investment but,today, with $3 trillion of international reserves and sovereign wealth fund of $200 trillion in assets, China has become THE investor.”
He goes on to add, “What’s perhaps the most impressive is that China is catching up to other nations in terms of innovation and in terms of education.”
What happens in China will not stay in China and we have work to do as a state and a nation if we wish to maintain the American Dream.
As global citizens we behave more like country bumpkins and need to step up our game if we are going to both compete and collaborate on the world stage. Too few of our citizens are globally literate — not understanding other countries’ history, culture or language.
China has awakened and is on the move. We need to know more and more about this sleeping giant, its language, culture, history, aspirations and beliefs. This fact is driven home each time I return to China, a country I’ve been visiting for a quarter of a century. We could start by setting policies in place that would help prepare our children for this changing world. Consider my last trips to the“Middle Kingdom,” where:
I met with top government, education and business officials whom all understood and spoke perfect English. As impressive as that was, it is trumped by the fact that a large percentage of the 1.3 billion Chinese people—one-fifth of all humanity—already speak or are learning our language.
Reggie, a student at Mianyang University asked me, “Tom what do you call someone who speaks only three languages?”
“Tri-lingual.” I responded.
“Correct,” he responded like an old school teacher. He then asked, “What do you call some who can speak two languages?”
“Bi-lingual,” I responded confidently.
“Right again,” he says with a smile. “And, someone who can speak only one language?” he asked with a glimmer in his eye.
“Mono-lingual,” I responded triumphantly and without hesitation.
“Wrong,” he said.
“Wrong? What do you mean wrong?” I demanded.
“Someone who can only speak one language is an “American!” He said, smirking.
Ouch!
I have met elementary school children, not just in the premier schools in Beijing and Shanghai, but in the countryside who speak English. How do our children compare in their ability to speak and understand Chinese or any other language? This, when during the early period of trade with China any Chinese caught teaching their language to “fan qui” (e.g. “foreign devils,” otherwise known as “Westerners”), were put to death.
Lacking a better understanding of China, its history, culture and language may be the death of us all.
The World Is Rapidly Changing
The meteoric rise of China has seen Mandarin enter the universal league of languages. At my suggestion, Oakland County Executive Brooks Patterson called for the teaching of Chinese in all Oakland
County Schools in his State of the County address in 2006. Many of the Oakland Schools have adopted the County Executive’s call and have added some level of Chinese instruction to their
curriculum.
Brooks Patterson, Bob Ficano and Mark Hackel –the County Executives in Oakland, Wayne and Macomb Counties respectively– along with Governor Snyder, who has already traveled twice to China in his first two years in office, are pragmatic. They understand that the Chinese are going to invest trillions of dollars around the globe in the coming decade. They know that people and investments go where they are welcome…and stay where they are appreciated. They understand that building two-way bridges with China will give our children and our state a competitive advantage going forward. So, they plant seeds of change that will benefit our communities.
Call To Action
So here is my call to action: “Learn Chinese!”
The governor, State Board of Education and the legislature should follow Brooks Patterson’s lead and call for the teaching of Chinese in all of our schools beginning as early as kindergarten. A good and fair standard is for every child to be proficient in a minimum of at least one world language before graduating from high school.
While learning any language is valuable, knowledge of Chinese will be invaluable in the future. Mandarin is becoming synonymous with the language of business and this will only accelerate going forward.Being able to understand Chinese history, culture and speak the language will be the equivalent of an Ivory league MBA as the 21st century unfolds. Put another way: If you know Mandarin, you are able to communicate with approximately 2 billion people in the world.
Today, far too few of our students have the language skills necessary to perform on a global stage.
Sadly, even after 4 years of Spanish –the predominant language taught in our public schools– many students may be able to conjugate a verb but they can’t ask simple directions, order a meal or find a restroom in Spanish.
The reluctance of policy makers to grasp the importance of understanding China and her language is a metaphor for a much wider problem: Our sheer lack of knowledge about all things“Asia” and, in particular, China. This is exacerbated by our failure to come to grips with just how much China will continue totransform our lives right here in the Mitten State, let alone the world.
Many argue that China will stumble and fall — proclaiming America an “exceptional” country — as if we can defy the gravitational pull of China’s rising. America, of course, is and will remain a great country. Yet, we would be foolish to ignore reality and view China through only the rearview mirror. China is like a kaleidoscope: Full of constant and unpredictable change. Its ancient history of nearly 4,000 years is intertwined with Confucian principals of harmony, stability, and order. This drives China’s decision making.
Governor Snyder has called for the reinvention of Michigan. Any “reinvention” will require a deeper knowledge of China and its language. If we wish to collaborate and compete on the global stage as this 21st century unfolds, we must first adapt to a new reality. Learning all we can about China and Mandarin would be a sensible place to start.
We can learn from China and we most certainly need to learn more about China. This may be a radical idea. Yet, we must be bold, creative, and innovative in order to collaborate, compete and excel on the global stage.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
Write a comment