Latitudes

Can study abroad repair rifts between the U.S. and China?

Xi made the announcement in November during a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in San Francisco. The students could travel to China as part of study-abroad or exchange programming, he said.

“The future of China-U.S. relations will be created by our peoples,” Xi said. “The more difficulties there are, the greater the need for us to forge a closer bond between our peoples and to open our hearts to each other, and more people need to speak up for the relationship. We should build more bridges and pave more roads for people-to-people interactions.”

China has lost ground as a destination for American students in recent years because of Covid-related restrictions on foreign travelers as well as geopolitical tensions between the two countries. In the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent data available, just 211 Americans studied in China, according to the Institute of International Education, down from nearly 15,000 in 2011-12.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing has said 350 Americans studied in China last year. (About 290,000 Chinese students studied on American campuses during the same period.)

The numbers are “off the cliff,” said Glenn Shive, a former director of the Hong Kong-America Center.

Xi’s call for more-robust academic exchange echoes efforts a dozen years ago under President Barack Obama to send 100,000 Americans to study in China. The announcement was welcomed by the current American ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, who called it “encouraging.”

“People-to-people exchange is the ballast to keep the relationship stable,” Burns told the South China Morning Post. But when it comes to restarting academic programming, he also acknowledged that it “may take time to get there.”

Study in China has been slower to bounce back from the pandemic than in other destinations for American students, such as Europe. And even before Covid, the number of Americans going to China was stagnant.

CET Academic Programs, a study-abroad provider, returned to China this summer and had 17 students in Beijing and 16 in Shanghai during the fall semester — a far cry from the 600 who participated in its China offerings in 2019, said Mark Lenhart, the group’s executive director.

Some of the students who might otherwise have studied in mainland China shifted to Taiwan, where CET hosted about 100 students. Taiwan, where CET has worked since 2017, offers a Chinese cultural experience but can be an easier place to study in English. It’s also a destination for students in science and engineering fields, which can be more difficult for foreigners to study in mainland China because of political and security issues.

Such concerns have been dialed up in recent years as the governments of the United States and China have increasingly viewed the other as not just political rivals but as competitors in technology and innovation.

As a result, bilateral academic and research partnerships have come under scrutiny. China has made it more difficult for foreign researchers to access archives and interview average citizens, while under the Trump administration, the United States began the China Initiative to investigate American scientists who work in China.

In July 2020, President Donald J. Trump ended the Fulbright Program to Hong Kong and mainland China after the Chinese government imposed a national-security law in Hong Kong. While the number of Americans who went to China through the flagship U.S. exchange program was small, its cancellation was both a serious and symbolic blow, said Shive, who ran Fulbright exchanges for two decades. “It’s a real self-wounding.”

He said he feared that resuming Fulbright’s exchanges to Hong Kong and China could be difficult given the current domestic political climate in the United States.

Shive and others said having so few Americans studying in China is detrimental at a time when mutual understanding is more important than ever. “I don’t think there’s a substitute for feet on the ground,” said Jeffrey S. Lehman, vice chancellor of New York University’s campus in Shanghai.

NYU-Shanghai, which offers full undergraduate degree programs, was able to continue to enroll both Chinese and international students during the pandemic, even chartering a plane to bring students from the United States to China.

But the falloff in Americans going to China during the pandemic means that today’s students don’t have older classmates to provide advice on studying abroad there. The lack of firsthand information means that students’ understanding of China is often shaped by political messaging or the media. “There’s a real separation of information ecosystems,” said Lehman, who often hears from parents concerned about their children’s safety in China.

The growing distance between the two countries has had other implications. Today’s students may no longer see studying China as a benefit to future careers in business or diplomacy. “Students are practical. If they invest time, they want to know there’s a return on that investment,” said Lenhart, who studied in China in 1987. The Modern Language Association found that enrollments in college Chinese-language courses fell nearly 15 percent between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021.

Lenhart said there are other barriers to regaining lost ground. Some colleges and providers that had programs in China before the pandemic have yet to return. The U.S. Department of State put its second-highest travel advisory on China, telling Americans to “reconsider” travel there, and many institutions tie their education-abroad policies to those government warnings. In Florida, a new law makes it difficult for public colleges to run study-abroad or exchange programs in China.

And the aftereffects of Covid have complicated study in China in practical ways. Direct flights between the United States and China are fewer and more expensive. The pervasiveness of cellphone applications in day-to-day life in China can make it difficult for a foreigner to do something as simple as buy a subway ticket.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., called the resumption of academic and cultural exchanges “the foundation and hope of China-U.S. relations” but said the U.S. government should act to change policies, such as its current travel advisory, that act as “obstacles for the recovery of educational exchanges.”

The statement said the Chinese government sought to have more international students come to China through scholarships, language study, and short-term programs. “The Chinese government has always taken a positive attitude towards welcoming international students, including American students, to China,” the statement said. No new programs have been announced that are specifically tied to Xi’s speech.

Lehman said there have been initial conversations between the Chinese Ministry of Education and educational institutions about ways to expand capacity for study in China. For example, NYU-Shanghai might be able to use its residence halls for summer programs for high-school students during college breaks.

“We have a responsibility to help students understand the diversity and complexity of China,” he said.

Here’s what two students learned studying in China

When he arrived in China, Ennis, who started studying Mandarin during his freshman year, said he didn’t have the language skills to navigate the subway. By the time he left, not only was he taking the subway, but he got into a foreign-policy discussion in Chinese with a stranger on the way to the airport.

As a physics major, Ennis hoped studying Chinese would expand his research opportunities. Going to China deepened his understanding of the country, he said. “I didn’t necessarily look at China as the big bad wolf, but I had a kind of ‘us and them’ perspective.”

Now, he said, almost everyone he knows from his summer program “is trying to find their way back to China.”

Maddy Ryan, a senior at the University of Mississippi, was approaching the end of her semester in Shanghai when we spoke a couple of weeks ago. Although she studies international relations and Chinese, she wasn’t sure she would have the opportunity to study in China during college because of the pandemic.

Ryan became interested in China after watching the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a grade-schooler. Still, she wasn’t prepared for Shanghai and its soaring skyscrapers.

Living with a Chinese roommate gave her new perspectives on Chinese culture. She was also able to travel with Chinese friends outside of the more international cities like Shanghai and Beijing, visiting one’s hometown in Henan province.

“I’m 5’8” and blond, and I was approached with such hospitality,” she said. “Everyone was so welcoming.”

Ryan said family and friends challenged her study-abroad plans. “The narrative politically is that China is not our friend. It was, ‘Why go there when they don’t like us?’” Ryan hopes to be a sounding board for other students, demystifying China and encouraging them to study there.

“There is so much at stake if we don’t understand one another,” she said, “and for our generation in particular.”

Several countries consider stricter rules for foreign students

• Australia is trying to cut down on the use of student visas as an avenue to work in the country, raising English-language requirements, imposing new restrictions on visas for graduate study, and scrutinizing applications from high-risk providers more carefully.
  
• The British government is considering limits on the time international graduates can stay in the country and work after they complete their studies. Starting in the new year, graduate students will not be able to bring their spouse or other dependents unless they are in a doctoral or research program.
  
• The amount of money applicants for Canadian student visas must have in their bank accounts to meet proof-of-funds requirements will double as of January 1. The country’s immigration minister also warned that the government could impose limits on student visas if colleges do not do enough to support international students.

What’s going on? Many of the new measures spring from concerns about fraud and bad actors in international-student recruitment. Another common refrain is the charge that people are using student visas as a way to be admitted to a new country and then work.

International students have also been caught up in broader debates about immigration. In Canada and Australia, rapid increases in the number of students from abroad are blamed for housing shortages, something that higher-education institutions have sought to refute.

What are the implications for global mobility? The measures don’t have the goal of depressing international enrollments, per se, but policies seen as unfriendly to foreign students can have that effect. When Britain previously put in place tougher rules for working after graduation, many blamed the regulations for undercutting the competitiveness of U.K. universities.

Could that give American colleges an edge in international recruitment? Again, it’s too early to say. Colleges in the U.S. have seen a healthy rebound from abroad since the pandemic, but the political environment here remains a wild card.

Around the globe

A special homeland-security advisory panel recommended a number of steps the Biden administration can take to quell campus antisemitism and Islamophobia, including offering emergency relief to international students affected by the Israel-Gaza crisis.

Higher-ed groups asked the U.S. Department of State to extend and make permanent a waiver of the in-person-interview requirement for certain nonimmigrant visa applicants, including for some international students and scholars.

The State Department said passport-processing times have returned to their pre-pandemic norms.

Several Democratic members of Congress called on the Government Accountability Office to audit federal-government investigations into allegations of foreign influence in government-funded scientific research.

A select House committee on China put out a bipartisan report calling for new research-security measures.

The U.S. Department of Education released a guidance document covering frequently asked questions about reporting requirements for foreign gifts and contracts to colleges.

Scholars at Risk issued a call to action on the war in Israel and Gaza to protect and promote academic freedom and institutional autonomy while combating violence, intimidation, hate speech, and discrimination, on and off campus.

Britain’s director for academic freedom of speech said students and faculty members can make provocative statements on issues such as the Israel-Hamas war as long as they do not break laws on incitement and harassment. Colleges that limit speech could face fines under a new complaints process.

France has announced a billion-euro plan to improve universities’ autonomy, cut the bureaucratic burden on researchers, and create a council to advise the president on science.

India wants to enroll a half-million international students by 2047.

Bangladeshi universities have shifted classes online because of political turmoil ahead of national elections.

David Price, a former Democratic congressman from North Carolina, is the newest appointee to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

The Institute of International Education named 20 Centennial Fellows who will conduct yearlong projects on climate change at the local, regional, or global level.

And finally …

C’est zogo. Go. T’es magna.

These are not phrases I picked up when I was learning French, which I studied beginning in elementary school in Canada. But the expressions — which mean, respectively, “it’s cool,” “girlfriend,” and “you’re mean” — are finding their way into the language through French speakers in Africa who put new twists on words or marry them with colloquialisms from their native dialects.

In the Ivory Coast, for example, mon pain, or “my bread,” is slang for “boyfriend.” Pain choco, or “chocolate bread,” means “cute boyfriend.”

Regional differences are nothing new in French (or any other language, for that matter): My Quebecois teacher called a car un char, but from our published-in-France textbook, we learned une voiture. But young and fast-growing Africa, home to more than 60 percent of all French speakers, is reshaping French — sometimes to the consternation of the language’s more conservative custodians.

Read this delightful story. That way when you’re in a market in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital, and someone uses the word frapper, you’ll know whether they intend to hit or help you.

Latitudes will be off next week for a holiday publishing break. I’ll be back in your in-boxes on January 3, 2024!

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on X or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.