Don't believe that rap music is a respectable art form, and that Minnesota hip-hop is world-renowned?

Proof arrived Tuesday in the form of 14 Chinese students and educators, who visited St. Paul to finalize an exchange program -- one that will export the United States' first accredited hip-hop diploma program to China's second-biggest music conservatory.

As local rapper Toki Wright talked to the Chinese delegation through an interpreter on stage at McNally Smith College of Music, the only term universal enough to be pronounced the same in Mandarin actually was "hip-hop."

"It's the music that speaks to the young generation right now," Gao Zhongyue, a vice president at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music, said through an interpreter. "[Hip-hop] is very popular in China, so we came here to find out how we can teach it and serve our students."

In December Wright and other McNally Smith staffers traveled to the Shenyang Conservatory at the school's invitation. Bassist Sean McPherson of the band Heiruspecs, another of the school's instructors, said the trip demonstrated hip-hop's global reach.

"This one kid came out of the woodwork and says, 'I'm a beatboxer,' and others were showing us how they pop-and-lock," McPherson recounted, referencing dance moves straight out of the 1984 movie "Breakin'."

On Tuesday, it was the McNally Smith staff's turn to do the proving.

Wright performed songs from his "BlackMale" EP and the duo Big Quarters played a track from their acclaimed album "From the Home of Brown Babies & White Mothers." Suffice it to say some of the lyrical content was lost on the Chinese audience, which sat stiffly but smiled and applauded.

Still, Zhongyue said afterward, "We can now see: They are experts at this."

Playing host to Arabs, too

McNally Smith's program also drew 30 music students from the United Arab Emirates last month for a daylong hip-hop course.

The music school had to start from scratch -- no pun intended -- when it created its hip-hop diploma program in 2009. The two-year program will produce its first graduates in the fall semester.

"There really weren't any guidelines for us, which may have been a good thing," recalled Wright, who became the program's coordinator after years of organizing the popular Twin Cities Celebration of Hip-Hop concerts. He also records for Rhymesayers Entertainment, home to Billboard-charting Minnesota rap acts Atmosphere, Brother Ali and P.O.S.

Instructions on rap history, music-business management and even graffiti art are now part of McNally Smith's regular curriculum. Other instructors include veteran DJ Freddy Fresh, African culture specialist Nneka Onyilofor and rapper/poet Dessa, who is headlining Saturday's West Bank Music Festival in Minneapolis.

"If they call and ask me to go to China, I'll be packed and ready to go in 10 minutes," said Dessa, echoing the enthusiasm of other staffers over the new exchange program.

In addition to modest financial gains for McNally Smith (mostly through Chinese students paying tuition costs to come here), the exchange program will bring clout to the St. Paul school and reinforce the importance of its pioneering work with hip-hop, said McNally Smith president Harry Chalmiers.

He was skeptical when a representative from the Shenyang school contacted him last year with the idea for the exchange program: "I seriously thought it was a scam, as in they would want my bank account to send them money."

Once he found out that the conservatory dates to 1938 and boasts nearly 8,000 students (compared to about 700 at McNally Smith) Chalmiers said he had little doubt the schools could work together -- just as he said he knew McNally Smith's hip-hop program could overcome any doubts other music educators might have.

"People looked down their nose at jazz, too, until Berklee started teaching it," said Chalmiers, a jazz trumpeter himself.

The program was one reason Yesha Townsend, 24, chose to move to St. Paul from her native Bermuda last year. Although she's actually a major in the school's composition program, with a minor in hip-hop, Townsend greatly impressed the Chinese delegates with her rapping Tuesday.

"I didn't recognize the scope of the [hip-hop] program until now," Townsend said. "The cool thing about it is how it really is integrated with all the other music programs here, and not just isolated off by itself."

A 'line that cannot be crossed'

China's own isolation is famously becoming a thing of the past, but its government still controls public expression -- a fact that flies in the face of the social-minded hip-hop taught in the McNally Smith program.

"We can allow [protest] to a point if it has substance, but there's a certain line that cannot be crossed," Zhongyue said.

After visiting the school in northeast China, Wright said he is confident its students will maintain hip-hop's social values one way or another.

"I make sure to stress that you always express yourself freely and powerfully in hip-hop music," he said. "That might not mean the same thing to kids in China, but that is one of the things they will have to interpret their own way."

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658