Beijing, January 7:

Chinese au pairs are the latest fad in New York as the Manhattan elite seek to prepare their children for the economic world of the future, which they believe will be dominated by China.

When two-year-old Hilton Augusta Rogers swings through the air on sunny mornings at the park she doesn’t express her joy in English. “Geng gao,” she calls to her father Jim. “That means ‘higher,’” he says, pushing the swing. The girl is happy and burbles in a child’s Mandarin Chinese, “le, le,”.

Then she asks for a fresh piece of ‘gua gua.’ Each word makes her parents, both Caucasian Americans, proud of their little globalisation project: Who else at Hilton’s age can already say ‘melon’ in the language of a future economic world power? Hilton is Jim Rogers’ latest investment. The 63-year-old earned millions of dollars by founding the Quantum Fund in the 1970s with George Soros. And while the world speculated on Internet start-ups a few years ago, Rogers invested successfully in sugar, copper, and nickel.

Since then he’s been known as the ‘Commodities Guru’. Now he wants to prepare his only child for the 21st century. “China will be the next world superpower,” he says, “We think we’re doing something very good for her.” That’s why he and his wife Paige have put Hilton in the hands of a Chinese au pair.

Like Rogers, many Americans believe China will overtake the US both economically and politically by 2040, at the latest. So they’re looking out for the next generation. At the very least it can’t hurt if your child can hold her own linguistically with the mightiest world leaders of the future. For this reason the ‘Chinese nanny’ is now chic in New York’s wealthier circles — to the extreme annoyance of French governesses, who are finding it hard to defend their traditional dominance over Manhattan’s nurseries against competition from the Far East.

Clifford Greenhouse is head of the Pavilion Agency. His firm has helped find maids and au pairs for America’s richest families since 1962 and now new requests for these most sought-after of nannies are landing on his desk so fast that Greenhouse can’t keep up. “I’m desperately seeking qualified Chinese women,” he says. “Bring me one and I can give her a choice of ten top families.” The in-demand nannies from Beijing or Shanghai can easily earn $100,000 per year with the right references — $60,000 more than their colleagues from Old Europe, who used to be so popular.

Not only do they need to speak fluent English and Mandarin, they also need to manage the complicated lifestyles of their young pupils. “My customers’ kids are busier than most adults,” says Greenhouse. It took six months for Jim Rogers and Paige Parker to find a nanny. For a while only unqualified candidates from New York’s Chinatown answered their ads in Chinese-American newspapers. “Most of them come from the countryside and speak Cantonese. We didn’t want that.”

Hilton Augusta will one day have to communicate with the business elite of Shanghai, and they speak Mandarin. Her parents brought Chinese friends to the au pair interviews to serve as a kind of language police.

The idea was to keep Rogers from learning the wrong sort of Chinese, and finding herself speaking undesirable slang later on. It is evident just how seriously her parents are taking all of this when one enters their home, a $1 million villa on the Hudson River.