"Chicago's Road to China" Presented By Linda Yu

ABC 7 News anchor Linda Yu’s recent visit to China was not just a coveted assignment but an emotional homecoming, she told alumni gathered for the International Roundtable at Gleacher Center June 15. Yu, who fled China with her family at age 2 just before Communists assumed power, said she took her own children there in 2003 to see her hometown before the rapidly growing economy erased it.

“I wanted them to get a sense of what was left of an older China and what was happening as China was becoming more modern than the United States in so many areas,” Yu said. “I wanted them to see at least some of the transition and what was going on. I knew after that trip that the lobby of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China now stands where my house was. And as I looked at my children, I thought, ‘Well, there’s something very fitting about that.’”

In a half-hour special report “Chicago’s Road to China,” Yu raised the question of whether China is a “friend or foe” to the United States. “Some people are afraid of the unknown,” she said. “They are afraid we’re losing all our jobs there, without realizing that what’s happening in China has made our lives in some ways better already.”

Americans need to start thinking creatively about how they can respond to China’s growth, Yu said. “We need to think out of the box, instead of saying, ‘We still need to have these same kinds of construction jobs,’” she said. “If we keep doing that, we’re still beating our heads against the wall. We have to think in different ways and get people here to think that way.”

Yu praised Chicago Mayor Richard Daley as an excellent example of a leader who has embraced China’s emergence as a world economic power. Chicago Public Schools offer the largest Mandarin-language program in the United States, she said. Daley envisions the expansion of O’Hare International Airport as a way to bring Chinese business directly to Chicago, instead of first to ports on the east and west coasts, Yu said.

“All this stuff gets loaded onto trucks and trains and airplanes and everything, and a lot of it is brought into Chicago,” she said. “(Daley) said, ‘What would happen—and what would that do for our economy—if O’Hare was expanded and we could accommodate cargo planes coming from China?’ How much would businesses love that? You would cut the time that it takes to get everything over here. What a big difference that would make.”

—Phil Rockrohr