American students’ love affair with China cools as political tensions rise

When the US suspended in July all Fulbright programs in China, part of sanctions over Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, his Fulbright program offered him and some other China-focused scholars opportunities to move their field work to Taiwan. Mr. Thompson, a 30-year-old University of Michigan doctoral student whose first trip to China was in 2009, was able to switch his topic to Taiwan’s bureaucracy but was disappointed with the Trump administration’s decision.

“It’s a personal setback for me and a big setback for the US-China relationship," he said.

The number of US students in China has dropped by more than one-fifth since a 2011-2012 peak, according to data released in November by the Institute of International Education. The number of American students in Taiwan has climbed by nearly 55% during the same period.

The shift comes in the midst of a deterioration in the Washington-Beijing relationship and, according to educators, predates the Covid-19 pandemic. Interest in studying Chinese on US campuses has cooled, they said.

Decades of engagement has immersed many American students into Chinese society in a way that studying China from afar could never accomplish, according to educators.

Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University, emphasized immersion in local life when he co-founded the Princeton in Beijing summer program three decades ago. Participants pledged to speak only in Chinese and were encouraged to buy fried-dough youtiao at local breakfast stands. “It’s not about just knowing a few Chinese characters," he said. “It’s about being able to communicate with other human beings in a normal and relaxed way."

Prof. Link, a long-time critic of Beijing’s treatment of human rights who has himself been denied entry to China since 1996, said that the program has been battered by the pandemic and that everyone is trying to figure out what comes next.

Amanda Morrison began studying Chinese in high school, encouraged by her father, who had done business in China. In college, she went to China twice, including with Princeton in Beijing. By the time she returned for a third time, in 2019, for graduate study, she said that she found herself more wary of offending Chinese classmates.

She had many open conversations with Chinese friends, but when she brought up in a classroom discussion China’s high-tech surveillance tools, she said a Chinese classmate froze and simply left the room. “Moments like this signal a sensitivity which makes you watch your tongue in future conversations," she said.

In 2008, China was host to the Beijing Olympics and experienced an economic boom as the world dived into a financial crisis. It was a time when China was “opening its heart," said Minglang Zhou, director of the Chinese language program at the University of Maryland. “In recent years China has had a different attitude toward the outside world," he said.

At the University of Maryland, which was host to “ping pong diplomacy" games after President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the number of students enrolled in Chinese-language classes has gradually dropped in recent years, and Prof. Zhou said more US students are choosing to study in Taiwan, where they can use social-media sites that are blocked in China.

Mary Gallagher, a political-science professor at the University of Michigan, said students in her classes now generally regard China as a potential enemy or a competitor of the U.S., while they saw China as a land of opportunity 10 to 15 years ago.

Ms. Gallagher, 51 years old, who first went to China in 1989, said whether China is seen as a national-security threat or not, it is a mistake to dial back on exchanges. “Even from a self-interested perspective, we are shooting ourselves in the foot," she said.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington said it receives many phone calls and emails from American students expressing interest in studying in China.

“Lies and hostility have started to cause misunderstanding and estrangement between the Chinese people and the American people, and created hurdles to the normal development of China-US relations," the embassy said. “This makes us deeply worried. In order to remove hurdles, dispel misunderstanding and build up mutual trust, we need to promote people-to-people exchanges and educational collaboration, which China is committed to."

Until China opened to the West, US students had mainly been able to study Mandarin in Taiwan. Between 1995 and 2005, US students headed to China, while dwarfed by the Chinese flows into the US, rose more than sixfold, according to the Institute of International Education.

Neysun Mahboubi, a Chinese-law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, described his 1995 summer in China with Princeton in Beijing as transformative.

“I was suddenly afforded a window, sharpened by growing language ability, into the unfolding of major historical processes right before me," he said, adding that the experience helped “drive every professional choice I’ve made in the 25 years since." Mr. Mahboubi said many classmates went on to have China-focused careers, including a classmate who helped open Shanghai Disney.

One alum of the program was Matthew Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who recently resigned as deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration. Mr. Pottinger, who has helped shape some of the administration’s policies toward China, spoke in May entirely in Mandarin on US-China relations at an online event hosted by the University of Virginia, drawing wide notice in China.

In the US, foreign-language enrollment has declined overall, dropping by 9% in 2016 from 2013, according to the latest available survey of US universities by the Modern Language Association of America. The number of students taking Chinese-language classes fell even faster, by 13%, during the same period.

At the University of Pennsylvania, which has had a Chinese program since World War II, students enrolled in Chinese classes topped 1,000 in the years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but has gradually dropped to around 700, said Mien-Hwa Chiang, director of the school’s Chinese-language program.

Many schools have in recent years closed Beijing-sponsored Confucius Institutes, which had opened more than 100 branches on US campuses to promote the study of China and Chinese. The centers attracted increasing criticism that they were used to disseminate Beijing’s views, and Congress cut some Pentagon funding to participating institutions in 2018.

Americans studying in China still vastly outnumber those in Taiwan, but in the long term a shift could have a big impact, said the University of Maryland’s Prof. Zhou. He said older generations of China observers who had studied in Taiwan were more sympathetic to Taipei.

Karl Zhang, Chinese-program coordinator at George Mason University, has taken his students for a summer trip to Beijing for about 20 years, but said he had planned to shift to Taiwan last year before the pandemic put an end to the trip.

He isn’t sure he will encourage students to accept Chinese government scholarships to study in China in the near future. "Right now, I’m not that motivated," he said.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.