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SECTION 4

Universities

American universities have long played a leading role in relations between the United States and China. Ever since the Carter administration first explored the possibility with Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese counterparts of sending Chinese students to the United States in 1977–78,¹ PRC government authorities (like their Republican-era predecessors) have seen American universities as integral to China’s economic and scientific development. For the first two decades after normalization, the Chinese government placed a priority on sending students in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Over time, however, fields of study broadened into the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, a change that has mirrored the shift in educational exchange from primarily a state-directed to a private consumer-driven phenomenon that saw an increasing number of middle-class Chinese parents opting to send their children to the United States for liberal arts undergraduate university, and even secondary school education. The net result has been that several million Chinese students have now successfully matriculated through the US higher education system. During the 2017–2018 academic year, for instance, a record 350,755 Chinese students were enrolled in American universities (with an additional 80,000 in high schools),² out of a total of 1.5 million Chinese students studying worldwide in the same year.³ (Altogether, since the late 1970s, an estimated 5.2 million Chinese have attended foreign universities.)⁴ Unlike the early years of this epic exchange, a majority of Chinese students have become able to pay full tuition, creating an extremely significant source of revenue for financially stressed American universities and colleges. (Chinese pay tuition worth an estimated $12 billion per year, according to the US Department of Commerce.)⁵

US universities and American society have benefited significantly from this exchange, and from the presence of international students generally. Chinese students have helped to diversify the makeup of US student bodies, they often contribute positively in the classroom, and they have made a real contribution in joint research projects with university faculty. Many have remained in the United States postgraduation to pursue professional careers, build their lives, and become American citizens—a sizable contribution to American society, to the US economy, and to technological innovation and the knowledge base in numerous fields. The engineering, medical, and hard sciences have benefited particularly, but so have the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, those who negotiated the initial educational and scientific exchange accords back in 1978–1979 could never have envisioned how much of a success story US-China higher educational exchanges would become over the next four decades.

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