At the
CSIS China Initiative Conference
yesterday (if you missed it,
watch here
), high-level officials from the U.S. government, private sector and academia discussed how to counter Chinese efforts to challenge U.S. technological and scientific leadership.
When the academic panel was asked to provide "one concrete, specific suggestion" for the U.S. government on how to improve our system, Mary Sue Coleman, President of the Association of American Universities, emphasized Chinese language study:
“Something that we haven’t talked at all about today that would be extraordinarily useful is to have the U.S. government, federal agencies, start investing in Chinese language study. We don’t have nearly enough students in this country. We did crash courses in Russian back in the Cold War. We’ve done nothing about China. The Chinese language is extraordinarily important and we need to have more investment in getting our own people fluent in this language because now we can’t even read all the stuff that’s coming out.”
