China, explained.

A woman wearing a graduation gown walking down a tree-lined path (Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The openness of US universities has helped shape how Chinese elites understand the United States and how they respond to it (Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

What the US could lose by closing its universities to China

A chance to influence America’s most important competitor for one thing – but that’s only the start.

Pete Millwood

6 June 20255 min read

The first 52 Chinese students to come to the United States arrived on 27 December 1978, less than two weeks after the two countries announced the establishment of diplomatic relations. By last year, the number of Chinese studying in America had grown to 277,000. Last week’s announcement that the Trump administration will aggressively revoke the visas of those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or that are studying in “critical fields” threatens to sharply reduce that number, as does a plan to vet future student visa applicants’ social media.

China would clearly lose from these policies – but so will the United States.

China has been a big beneficiary of American university education. Access to US universities played a formative role in China’s scientific and intellectual revival after the Cultural Revolution. It remains a key driver of Chinese research and innovation today.

But the United States will lose, too, not only economically – Chinese students subsidise American higher education – but also strategically. For nearly half a century, the openness of US universities has helped shape how Chinese elites understand the United States and, in subtle but important ways, how they respond to it.

The 52 Chinese that arrived in December 1978 were labelled “scholars” on account of their age. Most were in their 30s and 40s. They weren’t late bloomers; the Cultural Revolution had effectively closed Chinese universities for a decade from 1966. Returning from mandatory agricultural work, Chinese students departed for the US eager to make up time lost.

A wholesale demonisation of Chinese students and academics risks reducing not only the number of Chinese students in the United States but also their regard for American values.

For decades, Chinese propaganda had depicted the United States as a violent, divided society where the rich enjoyed wealth while the majority toiled. There was, of course, some visible confirmation of those claims for Chinese that arrived in the 1970s – crime in New York, lingering racial division, towering testaments to American wealth in big-city skyscrapers.

But quietly these early Chinese arrivals also questioned what they had been told growing up in China. Could a society truly be so unequal if nearly everyone had a car? In China, only high-ranking officials had access to private vehicles; everyone else biked or took the bus. America had divisions, but freedoms at once fundamental and mundane sustained the fabric of a democratic society. A powerful, popular president had resigned for wrongdoing.

Those impressions were not merely personal. The experience of studying in the United States helped shape entire fields in China. One of the country’s earliest influential international relations textbooks was written by an early visiting scholar, Ni Shixiong, who considered his year at Harvard beginning in 1980 to be the equivalent to the graduate training denied to him by the Cultural Revolution. He studied under Joseph Nye and Samuel Huntington and then shared their ideas in a widely used introductory study.

This impact extended into policy circles. A host of China’s top foreign affairs advisers have had extensive experience in US academia. Wang Jisi was a close adviser of President Hu Jintao and dean of one of China’s top policy schools at Peking University. Wang got his degrees in Beijing but spent a significant part of his early career in the 1980s and early 1990s on exchanges at Berkeley, Oxford, and Michigan. Today, he is one of the most important advocates for a more balanced and less bellicose Chinese policy toward the United States.

Tyler Callahan/Unsplash

It is worth remembering, too, that Americans were equally ignorant of China in the 1970s. Many had been drawn to the romantic egalitarianism of Mao and his Cultural Revolution exhortations. Jonathan Mirsky had so wanted to get to China in 1969 he’d tried to swim there. Two days in the country had been enough to make him a lifelong critic of Chinese authoritarianism. Others remained drawn to China but nonetheless questioned aspects of Maoist propaganda. Why, if women held up half the sky, were China’s leadership committees at every level staffed almost wholly by men, they asked? Some of these early visitors also went on influence at home: Susan Shirk would become deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and first visited China as a student in 1971.

China is not yet limiting the number of American students it admits. In any case, the number is very low – 900, down from 15,000 a decade ago. But the hostility with which Chinese students and academics are treated makes it even less likely that Americans will be willing to study in the country, preventing the development of more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of America’s most important competitor, as well as Chinese language skills that are key to comprehending Chinese geopolitical intentions and ambitions.

There are valid reasons to limit China’s access to most advanced American knowledge and technology. In the 1970s, American academics noticed that some techniques studied closely by visiting Chinese scientists – in agricultural mechanisation, for example – had been quickly applied back in China. There was satisfaction, and some trepidation.

By the late 1970s universities and laboratories had put in controls to disrupt what would now be called economic espionage. Researchers were barred from spending weeks studying technology in a single lab and background checks were conducted.

Such protections remain appropriate today, but a ban on Chinese students studying any STEM subject would only push fee-paying Chinese undergraduates to get this comparatively basic training at European universities or at home in China, something that may well please Beijing.

More fundamentally, a wholesale demonisation of Chinese students and academics risks reducing not only the number of Chinese students in the United States but also their regard for American values. Without the chance for direct exposure to the United States, young Chinese people will again have limited means to counter their government’s propaganda about a geopolitical rival: they will be told, as Mao told young people in the 1960s, that the United States is a failing society working to keep China down. Such a belief, if left unchallenged, could be of enormous consequence in the coming decades of Sino–American competition.

About the author

Pete Millwood

Pete Millwood teaches the history of US–China relations at the University of Melbourne.

Topics

China Diplomacy United States