Lost in Translation

A group of Chinese graduates throw their hats into the sky after the commencement ceremony at Columbia University in New York on May 18, 2016. Xinhua/Li Muzi via Getty Images

“My father came from Kenya,” Obama said. “He wrote letter after letter to come to college here in the United States because the notion was that there was no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried.”

Some 14 years later, it’s a moment that still stands out to Cheng, who moved to the United States in 2009 to start her doctorate at the University of Chicago and is now a research scholar at Yale Law School. “Anyone with more familiarity with U.S. politics wouldn’t have cared, but I remember it so well,” she recalled. “That moment resonated with me very strongly.”

In 2008, as Obama took the reins, Washington regarded Beijing hopefully—and academic connections were seen as a key opportunity to forge new ties. Under these conditions, they flourished: The number of Americans studying in China shot up by 25 percent while their Chinese counterparts’ numbers surged by 20 percent in 2007. By 2015, nearly 30 percent of all the United States’ international students came from China.

Under Obama, “there was just sort of a general optimism and a sense that the two-way exchange strengthened the United States and was healthy for the ability of the United States and China to manage the relationship,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council during the Obama administration. “That feels like a long time ago, climatically, from where we are now.”

Then-U.S. President Barack Obama greets students after speaking at a town hall-style event with Chinese youth at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai on Nov. 16, 2009. Charles Dharapak/AP

Today, that optimism has vanished. Over the past decade, these exchanges have all but atrophied—the result of the pandemic, travel restrictions, worsening ties, and Beijing’s growing repression—leaving an ever-shrinking space for academic engagement. It’s not just a dearth of soft power; it has real consequences in Chinese-language studies that could handicap U.S. policymakers for years.

American interest in studying abroad in China has plummeted, falling alongside declining enrollment in once-popular college Mandarin courses. At the same time, the number of Chinese students in the United States has waned, with Washington issuing less than half the number of student visas to Chinese nationals in the first half of 2022 as it did pre-COVID-19. The Chinese students who do come to the United States confront a more suspicious, even hostile, academic environment. As relations between the two powers deteriorate, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate the divide.

“Everybody has to decide which side they’re on, whether you’re a student, a professor, a businessman, a cultural figure,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “The old world that I inhabited for many decades of being able to go back and forth is over.”

In this new world—where talk of a new Cold War dominates headlines—exchanges between Americans and Chinese are critical. But they are instead splintering, with profound costs for both the students trapped in the middle and the future trajectory of already-tenuous relations.

“Politics affects Chinese-language studies, but then our poor understanding of China ends up affecting our policy and therefore our politics,” said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center. “It becomes a vicious cycle.”

Things didn’t go as planned. In America, the boys encountered rising xenophobia; in China, leaders were disturbed by their growing independence. Less than a decade later, they were all recalled to China, where they met mistrust and uncertainty.

Yet their journey marked the beginning of an academic bridge between Washington and Beijing—one that would weather geopolitical storms and the shifting whims of leaders. In the century since, millions of Chinese students have sought university degrees in the United States, eclipsing the numbers of their American counterparts, who largely look to China for study abroad or immersion programs.

On the U.S. side, one of the most concerted pushes to ramp up students’ interest in China came from Obama, who unveiled ambitious initiatives that pledged to have 100,000 American students study in China by 2014 and 1 million American students learn Chinese by 2020. To aid the push, first lady Michelle Obama centered a 2014 trip to Beijing around education, where she declared that “the best way to learn about one another is to live together and learn each other’s languages.”

“China’s economy was growing so fast, and people were flooding to learn Chinese,” said Eric Fish, author of China’s Millennials: The Want Generation. “There was this feeling that China is the future and we need to learn about it.”

A crowd of students applaud then-U.S. President Bill Clinton during a speech at Peking University in Beijing on June 29, 1998, on the last day of his visit to the capital city.Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Then the momentum ran out. Alarmed by a wave of reporting about dire levels of air pollution, American students were starting to cool on the prospect of living in China. “Pollution really took some of the wind out of its sails before the relationship got worse,” Daly said.

Soon after taking power in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping began tightening the screws, ushering in an era in which Beijing would be more repressive domestically and aggressive internationally—making study abroad an even harder sell. Those trends accelerated under former U.S. President Donald Trump, who accused China of economic rape, threatened economic decoupling, and ultimately froze the Fulbright Program in China and Hong Kong after Beijing’s sweeping crackdown on the island.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its accompanying travel restrictions and shuttered borders was just a nail in the coffin. Only 382 U.S. students studied abroad for academic credit in China in the 2020-2021 school year, according to the Institute of International Education, compared to nearly 14,596 students in 2010-2011. Locked out and facing dwindling academic freedoms, universities began turning away from China. In one of the most high-profile shifts, Harvard University moved its top language program to Taiwan in October 2021, citing the island’s “free academic atmosphere”—potentially reflecting a broader pivot.

“That’s a big move, and they didn’t even say this was about COVID. They said this was about institutional incompatibility,” Daly said. “It’s getting harder and harder to work with Chinese universities as they become more heavily directly managed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

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Protesters hold placards during a demonstration at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, on March 24, 2021, as students protest Asian hate crimes and bias incidents across the United States during the pandemic. Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

China still sends the most international students to the United States, although numbers have fallen since the onset of the pandemic. But reports of surging anti-Asian hate crimes—including violence against Chinese students—have fueled uncertainty and anxiety in Chinese communities, and international students often face an increasingly unwelcoming, even hostile, academic environment, particularly if they are in STEM.

Throughout history, “there have been different waves of [Chinese] students that kind of come in when relations are good between the two countries and everyone’s excited about it,” Fish said. “But then something happens. The economy tanks and politicians need a foil and relations sour, and then students are really stuck precariously in the middle, looked at with suspicion on both sides.”

The most glaring example is Trump’s China Initiative, which experts say was rooted in legitimate concerns—targeting espionage and intellectual property theft—but cast suspicion over many Chinese researchers and included numerous dismissed cases. Although the initiative has now ended, said Jenny Lee, a professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, there is still a broader negative stigma attached to China and activities that involve it. “The chilling effect of the China Initiative didn’t end with the China Initiative,” she said.

The chill was deepened by Republican politicians like Sen. Tom Cotton, who in 2021 introduced legislation to block Chinese nationals pursuing graduate or postgraduate degrees in STEM from receiving visas. Others stuck to the rhetoric. Students from China, “particularly at the graduate level, long have been recognized as a potential threat to the integrity of American intellectual property,” Dov Zakheim, former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense, wrote in a 2021 op-ed for the Hill. Shelley Luther, a candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, went further, tweeting: “Chinese students should be BANNED from attending all Texas universities. No more Communists!” She has since deleted the tweet.

To drive Chinese communities out of the United States in the 1880s, U.S. lawmakers approved the Chinese Exclusion Act, which effectively blocked the entry of Chinese laborers and denied immigrants citizenship for around six decades. Three years after it was passed, white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killed at least 28 Chinese miners, set fire to 79 homes, and forced hundreds of people to flee the town. Chinese immigrants were lynched, outcasted, and banned from entering America, but those days are long gone—or were.

“We have a long history of scapegoating Chinese Americans in this country, going back to the 19th century,” said Eli Friedman, a professor at Cornell University. “These are currents in American society that I would have thought we had a consensus on, and we see them sort of reemerging in some really unfortunate ways.”

Associate professor Han Wang yells in protest during a candlelight vigil on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on Nov. 16, 2022. The vigil was held in support of victims of China’s COVID-19 lockdown in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Pressures have also come from Beijing. Even abroad, outspoken Chinese students can be smacked by Beijing’s long arm, with Chinese authorities jailing a 20-year-old Chinese student at the University of Minnesota for tweets that criticized Xi. In December 2022, U.S. officials charged a Chinese student at the Berklee College of Music for threatening his Chinese peer over distributing pro-democracy posters.

Six centuries ago, at the behest of the Yongle emperor, Chinese Adm. Zheng He crisscrossed the globe to trade goods and knowledge with foreign kingdoms before China suddenly turned its back on the world. China under Xi has likewise grown more insulated, spurning English-language education, cracking down on private tutoring, and even curbing the use of foreign textbooks. “There’s been a lot of signals that China is kind of cracking down on the international route,” Fish said.

“The fewer conversations we have across the U.S. and China, the harder it is for policymakers to have quality inputs about what’s really happening,” said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University. Beyond the educational connections, she said, “it’s also a practical consideration of just how we keep the wheels on an increasingly tense U.S.-China relationship.”

They might be coming off anyway. U.S. universities that have historically had strong ties with Chinese counterparts are struggling to navigate new tensions, and students from both sides are caught in the current. If the number of Chinese students in the United States continues to drop and if U.S. youngsters opt for Florence, Italy, over Fuling, China, then experts warn that the United States will suffer the most.

“We’re going to lose our ability to understand China,” Daly said. “Even if you think we’re going to be in a decadeslong Cold War kind of struggle with China—which might turn out to be true—you still need people who know China.”