Yalies get VIP handling in China

A future president of the United States may be among a group of students who landed in China this week. And -- sorry, Harvard -- he or she goes to Yale.

At least that seems to be the wager Chinese President Hu Jintao made when he invited 60 Yale students and 40 faculty and staff to visit China as his high-profile guests. Apparently mindful that the three most recent U.S. presidents attended Yale, Hu is laying out the red carpet for the delegation.

Other college students can take their backpacking tours of China, freewheeling from noodle shop to hostel. After arriving Wednesday night, the Yale students were whisked in buses from the airport to a landmark hotel close to the Forbidden City, China’s center of power. They were given 30 minutes to freshen up before dinner: a multi-course banquet at the Great Hall of the People, where Mao Tse-tung once feted President Nixon and now Hu personally greeted “the Yale 100.”

“It’s pretty amazing,” said sophomore Zach DeWitt, a 20-year-old economics major from the Boston area with floppy blond hair and a booming voice. Taking a break from the tour’s wall-to-wall schedule Thursday, he ticked off a few of the dishes that were set before the jet-lagged students: steamed buns, soup, chicken, duck, tofu, ginger ice cream, “the whole shebang.”

DeWitt was part of a smaller group of the China-bound Yale students who met last week with President Bush and China’s ambassador to the United States, Zhou Wenzhong, at the Oval Office. In something of an understatement, DeWitt said, “That was very cool, to meet both presidents within about a 10-day period.”

Bush, of course, is a Yale grad, as was his predecessor, Bill Clinton (of the law school), and his father, George H.W. Bush, who once served as ambassador to China. Only Harvard has sent more alumni to the White House.

Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, visited Harvard in 1997. That prompted Yale President Richard Levin to begin lobbying to have the next Chinese president head to New Haven. Levin touted Yale’s long-standing ties to China, including its claim of having graduated the first Chinese student from an American college, Yung Wing in 1854.

Then, on an official visit to China in 2002, the current President Bush paid a visit to Hu’s alma mater, Qinghua University in Beijing.

All that may have influenced Hu when, on his first official visit to the United States in April 2006, he made Yale one of his three destinations.

Yale “provides an important platform for cultural exchanges between our two countries,” Hu said in his speech at the university. “To enhance mutual understanding between young people and educators of the two countries, I announce with pleasure here that we have decided to invite 100 Yale faculty members and students to visit China.”

That set off a scramble among Yale administrators to figure out the logistics of the trip and who would be going, university spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said. Following the wishes of Chinese officials, Yale selected most participants on the basis of their lack of knowledge about China. Eighty-five of the 100 members of the delegation had never been to the Asian nation; only six of the 60 students spoke Chinese, and they were picked to help prepare the others.

The 10-day tour will take the students to the usual sites: the Great Wall, the terra cotta warriors in Xian, the bustle of Shanghai. But they also will attend several get-togethers with Chinese students and families and take behind-the-scenes tours of such sites as a General Motors plant, government offices and a genetics lab that Yale runs with Shanghai’s Fudan University.

Yuan Tiecheng, a professor of international relations at Peking University, noted that Hu rose to a position of influence in China through his leadership of the Communist Youth League, and prides himself on understanding young people. No doubt, Yuan said, Hu sees this as an opportunity to plant friendly ideas about China in the minds of future decision makers.

*

mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com