Beijing placing language teachers in U.S. schools

(Agence France-Presse) Susan Wang couldn’t speak English when she arrived in California from Taiwan, aged 16.

Now 49, she heads a school offering US children a similar experience, plunging them into a Chinese world.

And her establishment is part of a rapid expansion of "immersion" Mandarin language programs in the United States, helped notably by Beijing providing low-cost native-speaker teachers to cash-strapped US schools.

Pupils as young as five at her Broadway Elementary School in Venice, west of Los Angeles, take classes entirely in Chinese, in a project so successful that it is having to move to a new campus.

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