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Susan Shirk Quoted in The New York Times

Chinese Leader Gets Ride on Chicago’s Big Shoulders

01/21/2011
Michael Wines, The New York Times

President Hu has left the building.

After three days of rock-star treatment — a glittering state dinner at the White House, a lunch with hundreds of American business and policy leaders who fairly gushed praise, a Thursday evening dinner here capped by a $1 million gift to Chinese students — President Hu Jintao of China and an entourage of senior officials departed for home on Friday.

Perhaps nowhere was he celebrated more than in Chicago, which is working feverishly to establish itself as the go-to city for Chinese corporate offices and investment. Mayor Richard M. Daley has been to China four times in six years to promote his (and President Obama’s) hometown. Chicago’s public schools have enrolled 12,000 students in Mandarin classes.

And one of Chicago’s elite public schools, Walter Payton College Prep, is host to the Chinese government’s most ardent effort at image-polishing — a Confucius Institute, one of roughly 280 established worldwide. On Thursday, Mr. Hu dined on filet mignon with civic and business leaders and Mayor Daley, who announced a $1 million grant from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Family Foundation to bring promising Chinese designers and architects to study at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.

She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.

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