Will China Save the American Economy?

MORAINE, Ohio—For years, Donjian Xu and her husband operated a sleepy Chinese restaurant in this industrial suburb of Dayton, cooking up American-style Chinese food like sweet-and-sour chicken and beef with broccoli for customers who would stop in on their lunch break.

Then, three years ago, a new crowd started coming into Dragon China: Chinese natives who missed home and were craving something different than the hamburgers and pasta that everybody seemed to eat in Ohio. The Chinese, mostly businessmen, would come in and order things not on the menu—noodle soup with vegetables and fish balls, for example. Sometimes, Cao Dewang, a famous self-made billionaire from China, would come in and sit at the corner table with his deputies, and “that's when we [would] need to make something really special,” Xu told me.