If you know about student loans, credit cards, microfinance or crop insurance, you might give Liu Mingkang a call.  Liu is former chairman of the stateowned Bank of China. Now, as the man in charge of China's Banking Regulatory Commission, he's also playing a key role as the Beijing government tries to grow China's middle class and balance the nation's export-dominated economy.

 "China's growing very fast," says Liu, dressed in a blue pinstripe suit and speaking in British-accented English during a recent meeting in Seattle. "We have a lot of real needs and lots of potential to tap."

 China watchers, including former Gov. Gary Locke, say some of the biggest opportunities in China and the rest of Asia are for professional services firms: architects, engineers, financial advisers and lawyers who can help the country further its development.

 "There is a lot of opportunity for U.S. expertise in China," says Locke, who introduced Liu to some 200 American bankers, financiers and insurance industry experts at a recent conference in Seattle.

 Service companies operating overseas also learn lessons there that translate into new opportunities, jobs and profits at home.

 "We've been doing mixed-use [development] internationally since the late '80s," says Bill Gartz, a principal at the architecture firm Callison, who oversees the company's international practice. "That's where we developed the skill sets. We actually reimported that expertise to the U.S. when developers here finally caught on to the benefits."

 Likewise, North American Energy Services in Issaquah learned how to operate power plants in deregulated markets when they started managing generating facilities in Argentina. Now the firm is developing new projects in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and is exploring sites in Indonesia and Vietnam. It's studying ethanol production in Brazil and seawater desalinization in Saudi Arabia. International operations are about 20 percent of North American Energy's business and will be double that in three years, says CEO Tom DeNova.

 Professional services are top of mind when Juli Wilkerson, director of the state's Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, talks about foreign trade in general and China in particular.

 "There's a huge market for engineers, architects, health care," she says. "We have all these services and products we can export there."

 Washington companies already export more than $8 billion worth of professional services supporting the jobs of 60,000 state residents, according to the U.S. Coalition of Service Industries. These range from architects designing new cities in the desert for Middle Eastern sheiks to engineers running power plants in remote parts of Latin America.

 Software fees and royalties accounted for nearly $1.8 billion of that. But finance and insurance companies did $685 million worth of business overseas, and a broad range of business, professional and technical services firms did close to $1.6 billion more, according to the coalition, which quoted 2005 data.

 There are even opportunities for educators to profit, Locke says. "There's a hunger among the Chinese for advanced education," he says. "The Communist leaders of Vietnam want their children to get M.B.A.s from American universities."

 For most Washington companies, foreign trade means doing business along the Pacific Rim. The big player in Asia, of course, is China.

 Gartz says the Northwest has a "natural cultural bias" toward Asia, which seems to be reciprocated. Wilkerson says Chinese officials are well aware of Washington state companies and products.

 "They know Washington because of Boeing, Starbucks, Microsoft," she says. "They know our wine, apples and cherries."

 As a result, Beijing sees us as distinct from the rest of the United States, says Locke. Hu got red-carpet treatment during his visit to this Washington last year ? he got heckled in the other one.