Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

A corridor in Wayzata High School lists the graduate enrollment of 2013 and the names of students who have received high marks for the AP exam in the past two years. Among them, there are quite a number of Chinese-Americans. The only student who was admitted to Harvard in 2013 is a Chinese-American girl.

Wayzata is located within a school district in a suburb of Minneapolis, and is considered one of the best public schools in Minnesota. One of my relatives works in this high school. During the Christmas holiday, I paid her a visit and had the chance to observe this typical US high school.

According to the census in 2010, there were 3,688 residents in Wayzata, 92.5 percent of them white and only 1.3 percent Asian.

These residents are mostly descendants of migrants from northern European countries such as Sweden and Norway. In Minneapolis, 30 kilometers away, there is a research center, the American Swedish Institute, the only one of the kind in the US. Wayzata is a typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant town.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of Chinese have been coming to live here. Many of the Chinese middle class pick the spot because of the quality of the schools.

I visited at Christmas, when almost all Chinese families were hosting a Chinese child of their relatives in China sent by their parents to study in the US. These children either study in nearby high schools or universities in other parts of the country.

It has been nearly 160 years since Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to study in the US, arrived. During the last 160 years, there has always been a wave of Chinese students going to the US except between 1949 and 1972.

This trend will continue. The only difference is that today's Chinese students are more likely to return to China. And the excellent performance of these students will exert an influence on the primary education of the US, including this small town.

This is a brand new cultural power full of vitality, which will have an impact on the exchange process between China and the US.

Even as they are shaped by US education and their values differ from older generations, they are still inextricably linked with China and will become the most tenacious bond between China and the US.

The US "pivot to Asia" strategy or the notion of establishing a new type of great power relations raised by China, both come against this background. The policymaking of both countries will also be influenced by the academic bond between the two.

During my stay in Wayzata, I heard an interesting story. A couple of Norwegian descent recently published a new book of fairy tales, The Christmas Wish. All the pictures inside are taken from real scenes. On the cover is an elf offering an apple to an elk. The author emphasized that the elk was not real, but a specimen "made in China."

"Made in China" has always been a sensitive phrase. Some locals compared the Christmas gifts in 1913 and 2013 and found the biggest difference is that all the gifts nowadays are made in China.

But while Americans busily calculate how many "made in China" products take up their supermarkets and worry their job opportunities will be squeezed, Chinese-American students are studying hard at the schools in the US. Many of them will enter top universities such as Harvard and MIT. Their efforts brew more significance than "made in China" products.

The fierce ideological rivalry between Chinese and US media is likely to continue. But a certain part of the power that can shape Sino-US relations will come from those hard-studying Chinese-American students.

The author is a senior editor with People's Daily. He is now stationed in Brazil. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn Follow him on Twitter at @dinggangchina