The number of American students in China is going up again
ON HIS VISIT to China last month Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, spent time talking to students at New York University’s Shanghai campus. Both countries, he said, needed to develop “rising generations who know each other, who know about each other and, hopefully, who understand each other”. For America that has become more difficult. The number of American students studying in China fell from a high of around 15,000 in the 2011-12 school year to a low of around 300 during the covid-19 pandemic.
The good news is that the number has been creeping back up again, to around 800 today. And there are signs that both sides want to see it rise higher. When China’s leader, Xi Jinping, visited San Francisco in November he announced a plan to bring 50,000 young Americans to China through exchange and study programmes over the next five years.
Lately there has been a flurry of activity. American institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and Purdue are launching new initiatives or restarting old ones in China. Jean Oi, the director of Stanford’s China programme, says her school resumed its activities in the country with a seminar last summer. Now it has a group of 20 students there for a quarter of the academic year.
Much of the action is happening at the university level, but some new ventures involve secondary-school students. They might visit China for a conference or a tour. Such programmes, even if not that ambitious, are important, says Rory Truex, a professor at Princeton. “At this point any China experience is good experience for American students,” he says. And it could always lead to more. Mr Truex notes that his own career as a China specialist began with an eight-week summer programme while in university.
Although things have loosened up since China ended its “zero-covid” restrictions in late 2022, suspicion and paranoia on both sides continue to limit engagement. Mr Blinken’s words are encouraging, but the State Department warns against travel to China because of arbitrary law enforcement, among other things. The department has also not reinstated the Fulbright exchange programme with China, which Donald Trump suspended. China’s incessant warnings about foreign spies aren’t helping. Some Western academics with a history of researching sensitive topics are forgoing travel to the country.
Chinese students, in contrast, are still going to America in droves. There are nearly 300,000 of them in the country. But some are also nervous. They have heard the stories of Chinese academics hounded by American authorities. Cong Cao of Nottingham University says he knows Chinese students who have declined generous scholarship offers. They “are afraid of going to the us for fear of being locked up in ‘small black rooms’ at American airports”.
Yet the exchanges are “even more important as things get more tense”, says Ms Oi. American and Chinese students who find common ground today may grow up to become leaders who keep the Sino-American rivalry in check. America might also take a more tactical view of things. The result of the current situation, warned Mr Truex in a recent article, is “a serious and overlooked knowledge asymmetry” which gives China “the upper hand in understanding its strategic rival”. ■
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