Then why they worry so much?
Fortune magazine
reported an 18% decline in the number of Chinese students’ applications for US universities for the 2022 academic year, compared with 2021. The US Student and Exchange Visitor Program
issued a report in April, saying there were 348,992 Chinese students in the United States last year, 33,569 fewer than 2020.
Decline in Chinese Students in the US Is a Bad Sign
Polls in China show that younger people — those born in the 1990s and later — have a more negative image of America than their parents do.
By
Adam Minter
2022年8月15日 GMT+8 20:30
China's ambitious students and their parents once dreamed of acquiring an American university education. Now that dream is dying.
During the first half of 2022, US student visas issued to Chinese nationals plummeted more than 50% compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to a Thursday
report in the Wall Street Journal. The US isn't directly limiting the number of visas. Rather, China's Covid restrictions, combined with the increasingly unfavorable opinion of the US held by younger people, are giving the Chinese second thoughts about a US education.
This is bad news for financially strapped US educational institutions, many of which rely on international students paying full price. But more will be lost than billions in tuition.
Chinese with experience living and traveling in the US generally have a better opinion of the country than those who don't. As their numbers decline, the US and China alike lose a crucial means of bridging the bitter relationship between rival superpowers.
China's infatuation with US education has paralleled its economic opening. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced his intention to send “thousands or tens of thousands of students to receive overseas education.” His goal was to rebuild China's scientific community and acumen after the destructive, anti-intellectual excesses of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1978, the first
3,000 students and scholars went abroad. From the start, US institutions were a top destination:
1,000 Chinese students enrolled for the 1979-80 academic year.
The attraction was multifaceted. US science and engineering programs were top-ranked, and students were ensured of good career prospects after graduation. American affluence and lifestyles, often conveyed via films, music and other cultural products, added to the allure.
So, too, did perceived
political and economic instability in China. During the 2003-4 school year,
61,765 Chinese students enrolled in the US, a little over 10% of the total population of foreign students.
As China became more affluent, sending a child abroad to study became an
attainable middle-class aspiration . For many families, it also became an implicit rebuke of a Chinese university admission system that prioritizes a single test — the gaokao — over academic and extracurricular achievements.
Admission to an overseas higher education program doesn't require the gaokao, and thus became an attainable way to circumvent the system. During the 2009-2010 school year, 127,628 Chinese nationals enrolled in US institutions; for 2019-2020, there were 372,532 — nearly 35% of all foreign students in the US.
Early on, it became apparent that most Chinese students weren't returning home. But rather than harangue or require students to go home, the Chinese authorities evolved to see an educated citizenry abroad as an asset (sometimes referred to as “storing brain power overseas”).
Overseas students and graduates were
encouraged to start companies and invest back home. Less benignly for the US, they were also engaged in pro-China advocacy groups and in technology and financial transfers via
foreign direct investment, joint ventures, talent acquisition and espionage (the volume of espionage remains a matter of debate). Over the years, these transfers became a matter of deep concern to US business and government officials.
But to a large extent these students were also viewed as means of diplomacy who might,
in the words of then Chinese ambassador to the US, Yang Jiechi, “promote exchanges and cooperation between the countries.”
That certainly was the case in the 2000s and early 2010s, when I lived in Shanghai and when
survey data suggests Chinese regard for the US was at its peak. Young Chinese who'd studied in the US played active roles in business, educational networking organizations and philanthropy, and were mainstays at restaurants, bookstores and other recreational venues frequented by expatriates.
This wasn't entirely surprising: Survey data
published earlier this year shows that Chinese (especially younger Chinese) with experience studying or traveling in the US have more positive attitudes toward it. At best these interactions promoted more investment, tourism, student applications, and ultimately partnerships, friendships and hard-to-sever commercial and personal ties.
Those ties and positive impressions have been tested over the last decade. Geopolitics, especially over disputed territories like Taiwan, have soured many Chinese on the US. Meanwhile, the admiration that many Chinese had for American political, social and economic stability has been undermined by news — often amplified by China's ubiquitous state media — of deepening race and class issues, gun violence and urban crime.
Finally, the Donald Trump administration's needlessly confrontational attitude toward the academic exchanges continues to exact damage — initiatives that restricted or even barred Chinese researchers and students from the US, or subjected Chinese and Chinese-American scientists to
criminal investigations based on their ethnicity.
Late 2021 survey results found that
62% of Chinese polled had a negative perception of the US. Even more disturbing, these results and
others show that younger Chinese — those born in the 1990s and later — tend to have a more negative image of the US than their parents do.
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