Babson College management professor Peter Cohan says Boeing may move its headquarters to Beijing from Chicago.

The company’s CEO Jim McNerney is eager to do so, Cohan writes on DailyFinance.com.

“Boeing already has $600 million in supplier partnerships with China,” such as a deal to build an assembly for a 787 part, he explains.

“Stan Sorscher, who spent 20 years at Boeing before taking a post at the Society of Professional Engineers in Aerospace (SPEEA) in 2000, told me that McNerney is hooked on the idea of shifting Boeing to China.”

“McNerney is comfortable with the way the 787 was developed but thinks it could use a bit of tweaking. And he'd like to shift more of the design and manufacturing of future Boeing aircraft to China.”

That would make Boeing a systems integrator that outsources product development to China and other countries, Cohan point out.

He writes that McNerney wants to partner with China rather than compete, according to Sorscher.

While Boeing may be eager to go to China, some say the Chinese economy now represents a bubble.

"The government did a great job of stabilizing the economy. In the process, it created a bit of an asset bubble," William Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard University, told USA Today.