"Not prepared to engage China in a serious and responsible way"

Part of the testimony of Professor Stephen Durrant, University of Oregon, to the Oregon House Education Subcommittee on Higher Education hearing on 2/14/07:

...At the University of Oregon we currently enroll 161 students in first- or second-year Chinese. By way of comparison, 1065 students are enrolled in first- or second-year Spanish, 392, French, 340, Italian, and 238, German. Considering that more people in our world speak Chinese than any other language, enrollments in Chinese are clearly insufficient. Without a much larger cohort of Chinese speakers in this country and in this state, we are not prepared to engage China in a serious and responsible way, and we are not in a position to bring the economic benefits to our state and country that will come if they not only speak our language, but we speak theirs as well.
    What are the barriers to increased growth in Chinese enrollments? They are both structural and psychological. Too few high school in Oregon offer instruction in Chinese. Most students, we know, continue to study the same language in the university that they studied earlier in high school, hence the tendency for the vast majority of the university foreign language students to select Spanish, French, or German. The psychological barrier is that Chinese is not just seen as difficult, but as virtually impossible to learn. However, for a native English speaker to learn Chinese is no more difficult than for a native Chinse speaker to learn English and yet hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of Chinese have accomplished the latter. But learning a language, particularly learning a difficult language, is best started early. The more students we receive at the university who have already started Chinese in their pre-university years, the more successful we will be at sharing our expertise with them. We pledge to work with you in any way we can to provide opportunities for young people throughout this state to take up the study of Chinese and prepare for what so many have predicted to be the "China Century."