American Students' Love Affair with China Cools As Political Tensions

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ASIA American Students’ Love Aﬀair With China Cools as Political Tensions Rise A decline in interest coincides with a deterioration in relations between Beijing and Washington

Peking University in August as Chinese students gradually returned to their campuses after months of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. THOMAS PETER/REUTERS

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Mike Thompson was all set to go to Beijing last year with Fulbright funding to research how the Chinese government recruits and trains its oﬃcials. fundrise.com/oc

When the U.S. 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 U.S.-China relationship,” he said.

Mike Thompson, shown in Dalian, China, in 2011, calls the suspension of Fulbright programs a setback. PHOTO: MIKE THOMPSON

The number of U.S. 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. RECOMMENDED VIDEOS The number of American students in Taiwan has climbed by nearly 55% during the same period. Ski Tourism Faces a 1. Boom or Bust Winter Season Going East The shift comes in the midst of a deterioration The number of students going to China has in the Washington-Beijing relationship and, Israel Plans to dropped in recent years, while Taiwan has according to educators, predates the Covid-19 2. Vaccinate Everyone by seen a rise. March. Here’s How. pandemic. Interest in studying Chinese on U.S.

Destinations of U.S. study-abroad students campuses has cooled, they said. Trump Defends 15,000 3. Remarks Made at Decades of engagement has immersed many Rally Before Capitol Riot China American students into Chinese society in a 10,000 way that studying China from afar could never CES 2021: Smart 4. Masks, Smart Air accomplish, according to educators. Puriﬁers and More Covid-Fighting 5,000 Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian Gadgets

studies at Princeton University, emphasized Security Beefed Up in Taiwan 5. Washington, D.C., 0 immersion in local life when he co-founded the Ahead of Inauguration 2000 '05 '10 '15 Princeton in Beijing summer program three Day Source: Institute of International Education decades ago. Participants pledged to speak only

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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."

Amanda Morrison, seen in Hebei province in 2019, began studying Chinese in high school. PHOTO: AMANDA MORRISON

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.

Hitting a Wall In 2008, China was host to the Beijing Olympics Interest in Chinese has started to wane on and experienced an economic boom as the U.S. campuses. world dived into a ﬁnancial crisis. It was a time

Share of foreign-language students taking when China was “opening its heart,” said Chinese Minglang Zhou, director of the Chinese 4% language program at the University of Maryland. “In recent years China has had a 3 diﬀerent attitude toward the outside world,” he 2 said.

1 At the University of Maryland, which was host to “ping pong diplomacy” games after President 0 1995 2000 '05 '10 '15 Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the number of students enrolled in Chinese- Note: Figures reflect fall semesters. Most recent data from 2016. language classes has gradually dropped in Source: Modern Language Association of America recent years, and Prof. Zhou said more U.S. 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.

Mary Gallagher, shown in Sichuan province in 2001, says it is a mistake to dial back on student exchanges. Seen with family members outside Beijing in 2003, she says her U.S. students’ perception of China has changed. PHOTOS: MARY GALLAGHER

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-U.S. 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, U.S. students had mainly been able to study Mandarin in Taiwan. Between 1995 and 2005, U.S. students headed to China, while dwarfed by the Chinese ﬂows into the U.S., 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 U.S.-China relations at an online event hosted by the University of Virginia, drawing wide notice in China.

Neysun Mahboubi, a Chinese-law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke at the Peking University law school in 2018. He was included in this 1995 photo of participants in the Princeton in Beijing program, which he describes as transformative. PHOTOS: NEYSUN MAHBOUBI

In the U.S., foreign-language enrollment has declined overall, dropping by 9% in 2016 from 2013, according to the latest available survey of U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

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Hong Kong police arrested more than 50 pro-democracy figures for allegedly plotting to destabilize the government. WSJ’s Andrew Dowell reports on how the biggest crackdown since the national security law was imposed chips away at the city’s rule of law and global status. Photo: AP/TVB

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.

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