By Geoff Dyer, FT China bureau chief
Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to ordinary Chinese on his Asia tour may have fallen a little flat, but there is one trump card he can play to score points with his hosts – the three members of Obama’s Cabinet who can get by in Chinese.
Two are Chinese-Americans, commerce secretary Gary Locke and energy secretary Steven Chu, both of whom are with the president in Beijing.
Locke did not learn English until he went to kindergarten, although he admits that he has lost some of his Chinese language skills since he was a kid.
Nobel-prize winner Chu did not really learn Chinese as a child, but has tried to study as an adult. And then there is Tim Geithner at Treasury who spent a couple of summers studying Chinese at universities in Beijing.
In Chinese financial circles, there are any number of people with immaculate English, but the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist party are not quite such a cosmopolitan bunch – the Cultural Revolution cut off educational opportunities for many of them.
Only one member of the current Politburo finished a university course abroad, vice premier Zhang Dejiang.
And Zhang did not exactly spend lazy days at the Sorbonne – he has an economics degree from the Kim Il Sung university in North Korea. I wonder if his course covered ‘global imbalances’?
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