What happens when academic exchanges between superpowers collapse?

Even during the frenzy of PhD applications, Yangyang Cheng, then a student in China, blocked out time to watch the 2008 US presidential debate occurring thousands of miles away. For 90 minutes, then candidates Barack Obama and John McCain clashed over issues like the global financial crisis and Afghanistan — but what Cheng remembers most vividly are Obama’s comments about his father.

“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 US 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% while their Chinese counterparts’ numbers surged by 20% in 2007. By 2015, nearly 30% 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 US National Security Council during the Obama administration. “That feels like a long time ago, climatically, from where we are now.”

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 US 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 US-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.”

In the early 1870s, 120 boys between the ages of 10 and 15 boarded steamships in Shanghai and prepared to journey to a strange, faraway land: New England. China was under the rule of the Qing dynasty and reeling from the Taiping Rebellion while the students’ destination, the United States, was just beginning to reconcile with the aftermath of a civil war. As part of the Chinese Educational Mission, one of the earliest examples of state-sponsored US-China exchanges, the boys lived with host families and studied at US high schools and colleges, fully immersing themselves in American life. In 15 years, the plan went, they would return with their newfound knowledge to aid in China’s modernisation.

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 US 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 centred 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.”

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 US 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 US 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.”