Inside a sunny classroom in northeast Washington, D.C., Baby Snoopy, Thing One, Spiderman, and other children in costume are busy tucking into lunch when three visitors—including me—disrupt the feast. As I wave, awkwardly, one of the students offers a shy greeting: Ni hao.
That could be because I am Chinese—or because these children spend their days immersed in Mandarin. At the Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, which I’m visiting on Character Day, 3- and 4-year-olds play, eat, and learn in Mandarin. (Older students are taught in both Mandarin and English.) Having reported on how deteriorating U.S.-China relations have throttled higher education and academic exchanges, I am here on a June morning with a related mission: to see if Washington’s hawkish China consensus has affected demand for Mandarin immersion programs in its own backyard.
Yu Ying was founded in 2008, right as Mandarin mania swept the United States. U.S. officials were largely bullish about the future of U.S.-China relations, and then-U.S. President Barack Obama championed both Mandarin language studies and study abroad in China. With one of his most ambitious initiatives, 1 Million Strong, Obama vowed that 1 million American students would be learning Mandarin by 2020.
“If our countries are going to do more together around the world,” he declared in 2015 alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping in the White House Rose Garden, “then speaking each other’s language, truly understanding each other, is a good place to start.”
By 2011, there were at least 50 Chinese-language immersion programs in the United States—eclipsing just around a dozen programs that had existed six years earlier, according to some estimates. With this momentum, and with demand for Mandarin soaring nationally, a group of parents in the national capital decided to start Yu Ying. (As a public charter school, Yu Ying is tuition-free and publicly funded; unlike traditional schools, it is run by a nonprofit.) Amy Quinn, one of those parents and the school’s current director of teaching and learning, told me that the group “wanted to create the school of their dreams.”
Even the physical walkway into Yu Ying, which serves up to fifth-grade students from around the district, looks different from that of a standard school. A winding red dragon path guides visitors to the school’s front entrance, while red Chinese lanterns dot classrooms. After-school programs can include mixed martial arts and Chinese song and dance, and Mandarin characters are everywhere—from posters lining the school’s walls to class schedules to students’ artwork.
Yet over the school’s 15-year lifespan, the broader optimism that once enveloped U.S.-China ties has vanished. Washington policymakers working just half an hour away from Yu Ying have hardened their rhetoric toward China, and relations have worsened. Those pressures have rippled into universities, casting suspicion over Chinese students, eroding demand for Mandarin language studies, and forcing universities to weigh tough questions about partnerships. Even though experts warn that these collapsing academic exchanges have real-world human and policy ramifications, Ohio lawmakers have introduced a bill that would sever any university ties with Chinese counterparts.
Inside the Yu Ying bubble, these pressures appear distant. Quinn and Carlie Fisherow, the school’s executive director, said that the U.S.-China rivalry hasn’t impacted financing, which comes from city allocations and additional fundraising, and that they retain full autonomy over programming. The school doesn’t receive any money from China or Chinese-affiliated organizations besides those supporting education and the arts, they added.
Demand hasn’t shrunk, either; enrollment based on a lottery system has resulted in a diverse student body, and competition to nab a spot remains steep. The impact of cooling relations “hasn’t borne out in our enrollment data,” Fisherow said. “We continue to have waitlists of more than a thousand kids year over year, and the waitlist just honestly keeps growing.”
Thousands of miles away, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the confluence of heritage speaking communities and wealth has continued to fuel interest in Mandarin immersion programs—despite the frostier geopolitical climate. One such program is the San Francisco-based Presidio Knolls School (PKS), also founded in 2008, which offers Mandarin immersion from preschool through eighth grade for a $38,450 annual price tag.
“In the Bay Area, I think we’re quite insulated from a lot of the developments that we’re seeing nationally,” said Chris Livaccari, the head of PKS and a former U.S. diplomat who did tours of Tokyo and Shanghai, referring to the fact that many local families have personal connections to China or Taiwan.
He likened the mid-2000s Mandarin zeal to the rush to learn Japanese a decade or so earlier—with both seen as a way to gain an advantage in the global economy. “Japanese was the language of the future, and now everything has flip-flopped,” Livaccari said. “I think we’re seeing now what happened with Japanese, which is that the economic and political incentives for, let’s say, middle America to learn the language have gone away.”
Losing these incentives, alongside other factors like staffing challenges, has in some cases led to the end of these programs. An Arizona school district, for example, cut its Mandarin immersion program in 2021 after a six-year run; a Kansas school is currently weighing the future of its program. In both Michigan and Delaware, parent pushback forced school districts to reevaluate closures. But it’s a mixed picture, too: Quinn told me that they hear Mandarin immersion offerings are still growing in states including Minnesota and South Carolina.
Still, the national craze for Mandarin is fading. Across the board, Livaccari said that anecdotal evidence suggests that more programs across the United States are shuttering, particularly in public schools. “Ten or 15 years ago, the parents would be going to the school board and saying: ‘Why don’t we have Chinese? We need Chinese. It’s the language of the future,’” he said. “Now the voices in those cases are more: ‘Why are we doing Chinese? Maybe we don’t want to do this anymore. Maybe we don’t want our kids to be connected to Chinese language or Chinese culture anymore.’”
The threat of worsening relations also looms large for many of the educators and staff underpinning Mandarin immersion programs, especially for those who rely on the convoluted visa system or have family in China. While Yu Ying has remained insulated so far, “schools have become a cultural lightning rod” on a national level, Fisherow said. “We will continue to lose educators if, as a country and a community, we do not treat schools with the care they deserve.”
In the past, PKS and similar schools in the Bay Area have typically planned annual student trips to China and Taiwan. This year, in part because of China’s slow reopening from COVID-19 restrictions, they pivoted to Taiwan. Livaccari hopes that next year will be different.
“We do hope next year that we’ll be able to get back to mainland China as well, because we want our kids to have an understanding of the whole landscape of the Chinese-speaking world,” he said. “However wrongheaded the government is, it’s still 1.3 billion-plus people that we want our kids to be engaged with.”
FP staff writer Rishi Iyengar contributed reporting.