American students’ love affair with China cools with increasing political tensions

“It is a personal setback for me and a major setback for the US-China relationship,” he said.

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

The change comes amid 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 have immersed many American students in Chinese society in a way that studying China at a distance would never be possible, 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 summer program in Beijing three decades ago. Participants promised to speak only Chinese and were encouraged to buy fried pasta youtiao at local breakfast stalls. “It’s not just about knowing some Chinese characters,” he said. “It’s about being able to communicate with other human beings in a normal and relaxed way.”

Prof. Link, a longtime critic of Beijing’s treatment of human rights, which has been denied entry to China since 1996, said the program was hampered by the pandemic and that everyone is trying to find out what will come next.

Amanda Morrison started studying Chinese in high school, encouraged by her father, who had done business in China. In college, she went to China twice, including Princeton in Beijing. When she returned for the third time in 2019 to take a postgraduate course, she said she felt more cautious about offending Chinese colleagues.

She had many open conversations with Chinese friends, but when she spoke in class about China’s high-tech surveillance tools, she said that a Chinese colleague froze and simply left the room. “Moments like this signal a sensitivity that makes you careful with your language in future conversations,” she said.

In 2008, China hosted the Beijing Olympics and experienced an economic boom as the world plunged 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 towards the outside world,” he said.

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

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

Gallagher, 51, who went to China for the first time in 1989, said that whether China is seen as a threat to national security or not, it is a mistake to go back in trade. “Even from a self-interest 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 an interest in studying in China.

“Lies and hostility began to cause misunderstandings and distance between the Chinese people and the American people, and created obstacles to the normal development of China-US relations,” said the embassy. “This makes us deeply concerned. To remove obstacles, dispel misunderstandings and build mutual trust, we need to promote personal exchanges and educational collaboration, to which China is committed. ”

Until China opened up to the West, American students were able to study Mandarin mainly in Taiwan. Between 1995 and 2005, American students went to China, although surpassed by Chinese flows to the United States, they increased more than six times, according to the Institute of International Education.

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

“Suddenly, I had a window, sharpened by the growing ability of language, to unfold the main historical processes right in front of me,” he said, adding that the experience helped to “guide all the professional choices I have made in the 25 years since then. ”. Mahboubi said many colleagues have followed careers focused on China, including a colleague who helped open Shanghai Disney.

A former student of the program was Matthew Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who recently resigned as deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration. Pottinger, who helped shape some of the government’s policies towards China, spoke in May entirely in Mandarin about US-China relations at an online event organized by the University of Virginia, attracting widespread attention in China.

In the United States, enrollments in foreign languages ​​have generally decreased, falling 9% in 2016 compared to 2013, according to the latest survey available among American universities by the Modern Language Association of America. The number of students in Chinese classes fell even faster, 13%, in the same period.

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

Many schools have closed the Beijing-sponsored Confucius Institutes in recent years, which have opened more than 100 branches on US campuses to promote the study of China and Chinese. The centers drew growing criticism for being used to spread Beijing’s views, and Congress cut off some of the Pentagon’s funding to participating institutions in 2018.

Americans studying in China still far outnumber those in Taiwan, but in the long run a change can have a big impact, said Professor Zhou of the University of Maryland. He said that older generations of observers from China who studied in Taiwan were more sympathetic to Taipei.

Karl Zhang, the Chinese program coordinator at George Mason University, took his students on a summer trip to Beijing for about 20 years, but said he planned to move to Taiwan last year, before the pandemic ended the trip.

He is not sure whether he will encourage students to accept Chinese government scholarships to study in China in the near future. “At the moment, I’m not so motivated,” he said.