Headline February 21, 2017/ ''' CHINA'S -*PARACHUTING*- STUDENTS '''

''' CHINA'S -*PARACHUTING*- 

STUDENTS '''

EVAN AS  US-CHINA  relations have slipped towards mutual antagonism, the flood of  Chinese Students  coming to the US has continued to rise.

Roughly  370,000  students from the mainland are enrolled in American high schools and universities, six times more than a decade ago. 

Their financial impact   -$11,4 billion was contributed to American economy in 2015,  according to the United States Department of Commerce  -has turned  *education into one of  America's top  'exports'*  to China.

It is a strange historical moment when the elites of a rising power send their sons and daughters, product of China's former  one-child policy to the schools of a geopolitical rival.

Yet the idea of a liberal Western education exerts an almost talismanic hold over china's ruling classes. Even President Xi Jinping, who is presiding over a crackdown on Western influences in China's schools, allowed his daughter to attend Harvard.

In 2005, only  641 Chinese students were enrolled in American high schools. By 2014, that students population approached  40,000  -a 60-fold increase in a single decade-

And it now accounts for nearly half of international high schools students in the United States.

As a new administration !WOW!ing    ''America First''  settles into the White House, there is a uncertainty about how long the phenomenon can last.

But the exodus of  Chinese students  continues for now,  driven not just by a push from China but also by a pull from the United States. 

For each rich Chinese kid who enters an American school   -whether private or public, college or high school  -the multiplied effect means that entire communities can be buoyed by the buying power of the world's second largest economy.

Yes, Yes! Chinese parents are paying top dollars to get children into U.S. high schools;

And Brook Larmer narrates brilliantly: When I first met  Yang Jinkai, two days before he boarded a plane for America, the smog hanging over his industrial  home city, Shenyang, had turned the sun into a ghostly orb.

The 16 year old paced around the family apartment as his mother labeled his suitcases and packed them with the comforts of home: quilted pajamas, chopsticks, instant noodles.

Yang had never traveled outside China. But he had already chosen a new first name for his life in America, Korbin. {''That sounds American right?''}, and was daydreaming about the adventure ahead.

''It will be magical,'' he said. ''I'll make a lot of American friends, I'd like to have an American girlfriend. Maybe''   -he shot a glance at his father  -I'll even get a gun.''

Over the summer, Korbin had been working on his english by watching, perhaps too zealously, the American television series ''Criminal Minds.''

To help Korbin escape the competitive straitjacket of the Chinese education system, his father had paid nearly  $40,000  to an education consultancy to get him enrolled in a public high school in Michigan.

The Yang family's ultimate goal was for Korbin to attend a top American university, and the name of his new high school, Oxford, only added to the allure. 

It didn't matter that the place had no connection to the British university or that this Oxford was a small town north of Detroit.

But the stark fact is that  Few public school districts have deeper ties to China than Oxford, Michigan.

In 2010, the town sought to create the first pipeline of  Chinese students into a public high school, one that embodied its high school's motto ''where the globe is our classroom''  -even as it brought tuition money to the school.

But when a Beijing education company proposed building a multi-million-dollar dormitory for Chinese students on the Oxford campus, a community battle ensued.

Chance put Korbin's family at the starting point of Oxford's experiment, in Shenyang.  His parents grew up without proper education, in rural villages haunted by the  memories of famine    

His father, Yang Huaiguo, migrated to Shenyang and scavenged for scrap metal before finding success in the boiler-repair business and real estate.

But he worried about Korbin's education and the almost unrelenting pressure to study for the two exams that determine a Chinese student's future.: the high school entrance exam, the Zhongkao, and the university-entrance exam, the  gaokao.

There seemed to be no way out, until Korbin;s school opened an international wing in partnership with Oxford.

On his first day in Oxford, Korbin marveled at the blue skies, so different from northeastern China, and the absence of skyscrapers. All of America, in his TV-fueled imagination, was supposed to be like New York.

Beyond its main street and century-old-storefronts, Oxford [population 3,500] is a patchwork of gravel pits and horse stables, wooded subdivisions and and a strip mall containing a single Chinese restaurant.

Korbin's host family lived in a house on a leafy cul-de-sac, with two basketball hoops in the driveway and a trampoline out back.

Suddenly Korbin had four blond American siblings and a host mother he called ''Mom''. 

His host father worked as an engineer in an automobile industry that blamed the loss of thousands of jobs in the last recession on a single culprit: China.

The Honour and Serving of the latest 'Operational Research' on Students, Education and Opportunities continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward. And see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of China and the World. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the ecosystem 2011.

''' Students & Generations '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless