Tom Watkins is an education and business consultant in Metro Detroit and China. He was Michigan superintendent of schools, 2001-05. Read Watkins' "China Bridge -- Michigan" at www.domemagazine.com.

As President Barack Obama visits China for the first time, the continued strategic dialogue between Obama and Chinese President Hu is important not only for our two countries, but all of humanity. Yet, in Michigan, we must ask: Where is our plan to assure we can ride the China wave in ways that benefit our citizens?

My more than 20 years of travel to China convinces me we need to be devising an aggressive plan to make China's rise and globalization work for reinventing and revitalizing Michigan's economy. But we must stop the whining and start building the relationships or "guanxi" necessary for sustained business dealings.

  Sadly, there is no such plan in Michigan today. Advertisement

 Not only has Gov. Jennifer Granholm still not made a trade mission to China in her nearly seven years in office, she continues to go to the anti-China well to curry political favor. As recently as Aug. 25, in a fundraising appeal for her lieutenant governor's bid to succeed her, Granholm wrote: "Michigan stands at a crossroads: what kind of state do we want to be in the 21st century? Do we want to be a place where the unemployed suffer while we watch our jobs shipped off on a slow boat to China, on the Internet to India, or on a fast track to Mexico?"

This type of rhetoric not only fails to create a single Michigan job, it makes it that much harder by perpetuating anti-Asian sentiment.

China is underwriting U.S. debt to the tune of $1 trillion and growing. It has the fastest-growing large economy in the world. It has made more autos than America for seven months in a row. The Chinese market, with 1.3 billion people and a rising middle class, is the mother lode of global commerce. More than 300 million Chinese people have risen out of poverty in the last quarter century.

The county executives from Wayne and Oakland, Robert Ficano and L. Brooks Patterson, along with Paul Gieleghem, chairman of the Macomb County Board of Commissioners, are building bridges by organizing multiple trade missions, setting up offices in China and encouraging their local community schools to begin to offer Mandarin Chinese to their students.

There are some promising signs since Ficano recently took House Speaker Andy Dillon to China. His Republican counterpart, Kevin Elsenheimer, and Pam Byrnes, the House Democratic speaker pro tempore, have traveled to China as well. Perhaps the county leaders and state leaders will provide the leadership nucleus and bring along Granholm to develop a thoughtful plan to assure China's rise does not come at Michigan's demise.

Steps they should take immediately:

• Drop the anti-China political rhetoric.

• Seek advice from knowledgeable individuals inside and outside Michigan on what other states and nations are doing that we should emulate.

• Convene a cross section of the Chinese-American community and business leaders to find out how the state can leverage existing China relationships.

• Brainstorm with various China experts on a China plan with emphasis on economic, cultural, agricultural, tourism and education initiatives.

As the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu said, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." It is time to step up, Michigan.