The number of Americans studying in China is a fraction of what it once was

The first time Lily Pike went to study in China, she was in high school. She has been back several times over the years, most recently completing a six-month intensive language course in Beijing. She said it was grueling, but that she got a lot out of it.

“I feel like every time I’ve gone back to study Chinese, I’ve been surprised by just how difficult it is and how much more there is to learn,” Pike said. There’s actually an idiom for that, she added, along the lines of “speed won’t get you there,” because learning Chinese is a long journey.

The US and China have disagreed on many things. But one thing they do agree on is wanting larger numbers of exchange students between the two countries. American students, though, are not as eager as they once were to travel to China.

One of the reasons that Pike mentioned is all the bureaucratic realities that foreigners have to deal with, something she said that Americans need to be patient with.

“When you arrive in a Chinese city, you have to register with the police within 24 hours,” she said. “I was moving, trying to find an apartment when I first arrived. So, I moved three times in the first few weeks, and each time I had to go to a different local police station to file my paperwork. Each police station had different requirements for the kinds of documents I needed,” including a lease or a landlord’s household registration.

On the whole, Pike said she would encourage American students thinking about studying in China to go for it, because there’s no substitute for being on the ground — taking in the sights and smells and having actual conversations with real people in the country.

American diplomats are sure to agree.

“When we think about diplomacy and the relationship between two big, globally oriented countries, you have to start with people,” US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said while speaking at the Asia Society in New York last month.

Burns told the audience that people from the US and China have developed all kinds of relationships over decades, and that American students going there to study are an important part of the bigger picture. But, he pointed out a massive discrepancy in the numbers of students going to China versus those coming to the US largely because it’s easier for Chinese students to come study in the United States. 

“The number of American students was at 15,000 as recently as 2015, 2016, but because of zero-COVID and the [COVID-19] pandemic, it’s now about 880 American students in China versus 300,000 Chinese students here in the United States,” Burns said.

The ambassador went on to say that both the Biden administration and the government of Chinese leader Xi Jinping want more Americans studying in China.

Promotional material

The Chinese government helped sponsor a promotional video from Shenzhen showing American students visiting the city. It mentions China’s goal of attracting 50,000 American students — an ambitious number. 

Kaiser Kuo, who is Chinese American, a longtime China watcher and host of the popular “Sinica Podcast,” said that many young people in the US are more fascinated with Korean and Japanese language and culture at the moment, and many Americans no longer see China as part of a lucrative career pathway. 

“There was a while where everyone living on the Upper West Side [of New York City] had a Chinese nanny for their kids,” Kuo said. “They were all taking Mandarin immersion classes. I think that corresponded to a moment where they saw a lot of economic opportunity in China. That’s clearly not the case anymore.”

Another disincentive, according to Kuo, has come straight out of Washington. The US State Department has a travel warning telling American citizens to think twice about going to China. And that is “due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

“This is part of the American zeitgeist right now,” Kuo said. “There’s this so-called bipartisan consensus on China, that China is the new ‘baddie’ in the world and we’re all supposed to loathe and fear it. That’s obviously going to affect interests.”

But Kuo said that if you’re an American student in China, especially a language student, the risk of being arbitrarily detained is next to zero.

Isaac Stone Fish said that going to China to study is not a good idea. He was an exchange student in China in the early 2000s and went on to become a China-based journalist. He now works as a global business consultant in New York.

“It breaks my heart to have to say this but I really don’t think China is a place that American students can go anymore,” he said. “I’m very worried about a war between the United States and China over Taiwan, and having people stuck there is a very scary possibility. 

Others say that a Chinese attack against Taiwan is not an imminent risk.

Andrew Field teaches history at Duke Kunshan University, a joint venture between Duke University and China’s Wuhan University, and he has been living and working in China since the 1990s. Field said the fraught relationship between Beijing and Washington is not reflected in the people-to-people connections that American students have been able to cultivate by spending time in China.

In terms of the possibility of China attacking Taiwan and dragging the US into a war, he said, “This is an issue that has been going on for 70-plus years. And yet, countless thousands of Americans have come to China, and millions of Chinese have gone to America. Again, at the people-to-people level, I think the relationship is still relatively healthy.”

Political atmosphere

Experts in international education say there are certain considerations that American students should be aware of when spending any length of time in China. The Communist Party is the ultimate authority in political life. Government surveillance of online communications and social media is a given there. And academic freedom in a way that often defines university life in the US does not exist in China. 

It’s important to be realistic about studying in China, said Neysun Mahboubi, the director of the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

“A question that we can ask ourselves is, ‘Has China become so significantly more closed or more repressive that the calculus for the benefits of us being on the ground here, having dialogues with Chinese counterparts, learning things about China has dramatically changed?”

Things could change between the Us and China, and they can always get worse, Mahboubi added. But as he and his colleagues studying in Beijing see the situation right now, the opportunities that come with being on the ground in China definitely outweigh the risks of not being there at all.