In January 2024, Florida International University (FIU) arrived at the final step of a long partnership. The school terminated several of its successful partnerships with Chinese universities, including a Spanish language program, engineering programs, and a dual-degree hospitality program. FIU’s decision to cut its relationships with Chinese institutions of higher learning came in the wake of mandates by the Florida Board of Governors—the board that oversees Florida’s public university system—to increase oversight of university partnerships with seven countries of concern, including China.
For the last few decades, it has been commonplace to hear of American students crossing the Pacific to further their academics abroad. But as the political climate between the U.S. and China grows more tense, the future of these academic ventures is becoming increasingly uncertain.
In August 2024, Andrew DeWeese ’24 will be moving to China to pursue a one-year master’s degree in Global Affairs at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. For DeWeese, who has always been interested in politics and international relations, studying in China is essential to broadening his knowledge and experience.
“I realized that there’s this whole half of the world that I didn’t understand,” said DeWeese.
During his time at Yale, he has studied Mandarin, as well as Chinese history, politics, and society.
DeWeese, who is also interested in foreign policy, has spent time working as a strategy analyst in D.C. There, he noticed a disconnect in attitudes toward China between D.C. foreign policy circles and those who study China in academia.
“I just think we need more people who study China and are involved in national security to actually go there and better understand the country,” DeWeese told The Politic. “I’ve wanted to be a kind of bridge between the national security world and China.”
DeWeese will land in Beijing as a member of the newest cohort of Schwarzman Scholars, a program created in 2016 to offer future leaders an immersive understanding of China and its culture. The fully-funded master’s program places emphasis on cross-cultural understanding, which is why its cohorts are designed to be roughly 40% American students, 20% Chinese students, and 40%students from other countries. The Schwarzman Scholars website proudly features founding trustee Stephen Schwarzman’s famous quote: “Those who will lead the future must understand China today.”
According to DeWeese, the cohort of scholars is more than just people who are involved with foreign policy. It’s comprised of people “who are professionals in their fields who think that they need to understand China to advance that view,” he said. The program brings people from across industries—from professional athletes to entrepreneurs to a founder of a pharmaceutical company—to learn about China.
While the Schwarzman Scholars program was established only eight years ago, American scholarly partnerships with China have a long history. Some universities, including Duke and New York University (NYU), have four-year, degree-granting campuses in China established in conjunction with Chinese universities (Duke Kunshan University, NYU Shanghai). These institutions were established with similar goals of global citizenship and cross-cultural understanding. Chinese graduate scholarship programs similar to Schwarzman Scholars, such as the Yenching Scholars program at Peking University, also provide scholars from around the world full scholarships for a two-year master’s degree of broad, interdisciplinary scope that reflects global perspectives.
There have also been Chinese initiatives in the United States that offer Chinese language and cultural instruction. For example, in 2004, the Chinese International Education Foundation—an offshoot of the Chinese Ministry of Education—established several “Confucius Institutes” with the purpose of promoting Chinese language and culture. By 2017, there were 525 Confucius Institutes at colleges and universities across 146 countries, as well as 1,113 Confucius classrooms at primary and secondary schools. However, due to concern that Confucius Institutes perpetuated Chinese influence, then-President Donald Trump signed a defense bill into law in 2018 that restricted funding for Chinese language study to schools that offered Confucius Institutes. By June 2022, 104 of 118 Confucius Institutes in the U.S. were shut down.
The suspicion towards and subsequent closing of Confucius Institutes reflects a broader trend in American-Chinese academic partnerships: academic institutions must continually reevaluate how to maintain ties amidst a tense and ever-changing relationship between the United States and China.
Michael Szonyi, the Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History at Harvard, spent the Fall 2023 semester as a visiting professor at Xiamen University in Xiamen, Fujian, China. Szonyi noted that beyond his academic duties, there was a political dimension to his visit.
“I thought it was important to convey to Chinese colleagues that American scholars like myself are still committed to collaborating with them and engaging with them despite the deteriorating broader bilateral relationship,” Szonyi said in a webinar hosted by the University of California, Irvine Long US-China Institute on January 30th.
Sznoyi also emphasized in the webinar that despite negative media coverage of the academic exchange climate in China, he had a positive experience—ranking it as “one of the intellectual high points” of his career. However, Szonyi was quick to remind the audience that studying in China carries some inherent challenges. He mentioned that his experience was tinged by the limitations placed upon his talks by university officials, who often restricted “sensitive” topics, such as discussion of Xinjiang or Tibet. Experiences like these are representative of the larger concerns around academic freedom foreigners are now facing as scholars in China.
The United States government has also warned citizens about the risks of traveling to China. In July 2023, an official advisory recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China due to the risks of exit bans and wrongful detentions. The Overseas Security Advisory Council even published a pamphlet specifically for students warning them of arbitrary legal enforcement, lack of privacy, and potential for exploitation and blackmail.
The risks to American students studying and working in China are indeed serious: in 2020, Alyssa Petersen, the American director of the teaching exchange program China Horizons, was arrested and detained in a Chinese jail outside Shanghai. She and her employer Jacob Harlan were accused of “illegally moving people across borders.”
The exchange program China Horizons, which for 17 years had brought American students to China to teach English, closed after the arrests, citing “increasing political and economic problems between the U.S. and China.” After considerable political and public mobilization, the case was taken up by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which called the arrests “arbitrary” and noted that they coincided with the detention of a Chinese official in the US on visa fraud charges. Petersen was found not guilty and returned to the United States in 2022 after two years in prison. Harlan remains in detention in China.
FIU is not the only institution that has recently removed China-based programs. In 2021, the Harvard Crimson reported that Harvard Beijing Academy—the school’s Chinese summer study abroad program—would be moving to Taipei “due to a perceived lack of friendliness from the host institution, Beijing Language and Culture University.”
As university partnerships become increasingly politically oriented and risky, some observers feel that universities will be more wary of investing in China. Liam Knox, an admissions and enrollment reporter with Inside Higher Ed, told The Politic that during his conversations with Duke University president Vincent Price, Price spoke about the future of Duke’s academic partnership with Wuhan University. When the time comes to renew its partnership in 2027, “Duke will have to take a look at it to be ‘clear-eyed’ about the future,” Knox recalls Price saying. Knox believes this is a common sentiment among many university leaders now that the stakes of partnering with China are higher due to greater political scrutiny and complications with academic freedom.
In recent years, universities have faced significant scrutiny from American politicians about their partnerships with China. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ’01 has restricted all state colleges and universities from partnering with universities based in China, unless approved by the state’s Board of Governors or the Board of Education. “The Chinese Communist Party is not welcome in the state of Florida,” he said in a statement justifying his educational reforms. In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) called for 22 universities to end their partnerships with Chinese universities, arguing that these partnerships sustain Chinese attempts to steal technology for the development of military technologies.
While many view this scrutinization as baseless, in recent years, we have seen examples of China meddling in American universities’ affairs. Dr. Charles Lieber, former chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology department, was sentenced to two days in prison in 2023 for falsely denying his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan and Wuhan University of Technology (WUT). The Thousand Talents Plan, which contractually paid Lieber for his efforts, sought to recruit advanced scientists to China to further their scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security. Lieber also failed to report the income he was receiving from WUT as one of their “Strategic Scientists.” Situations like these, in which the Chinese government tries to exploit American universities and their officials, cause politicians and administrative officials to be wary of continuing their partnerships with China.
In fact, despite the closing of partnerships such as the Confucius Institutes, China still holds influence on many American campuses. China still actively coordinates and communicates with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA), which were created by the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1970s to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that criticize China. Many CSSA chapters only accept Chinese citizens and are provided funding and guidance from the Chinese government. While the initiative is relatively small today, there are roughly 150 CSSAs scattered around American college campuses, according to the U.S. State Department. This demonstrates how China’s attempts to influence American universities have not always followed a spirit of cooperation.
Even the Schwarzman Scholars program has gained attention from critics about the involvement of the CCP in its administration. As one of few educational initiatives in China without a partner American institution, this program is uniquely vulnerable to influence from the CCP. The Schwarzman Scholars program is tied to the U.S. solely through its founder, Stephen Schwarzman, who has billions of dollars worth of business dealings in China. Top officials from the United Front, the CCP’s body responsible for establishing ideological sway, have been involved with the administration of Schwarzman Scholars and have praised members of the program’s administration, such as founding dean David Daokui Li.
Partnerships between universities have not always been such a point of contention. In fact, these partnerships were once seen as exciting new territory for growth in the academic exchange between the East and West.
“The balloon time for these partnerships was the 2000s, early 2010s, all the way through the end of the Obama administration,” Liam Knox, an admissions and enrollment reporter for Inside Higher Ed, told The Politic. According to Knox, partnerships between institutions helped to bridge the cultural worlds of the U.S. and China and served as a symbol of improving Sino-American relations.
However, relations between the United States and China declined with the Trump presidency and the ensuing trade war, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that managing the United States’ relationship with China would be “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.” As the relationship grew tense, academic exchange suffered the consequences with fewer than 400 American students in China in October 2022—approximately 80% down from pre-pandemic numbers.
“The isolationist tendencies are coming back, especially in terms of academic research and research that could have national security or economic competitiveness implications,” Knox said. Even seemingly harmless programs are being shut down due to the cold political situation. Knox points to the closure of the FIU hospitality program, which is unrelated to national security or technological competition, as an example.
Ostensibly, there is support and funding from Beijing for continuing and expanding academic partnerships. In his recent November 2023 visit to San Francisco, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China was ready to welcome 50,000 Americans in the next five years for exchange and study programs. In January 2024, Xi personally invited students and staff from Muscatine, Iowa, to come to China on an all-expenses-paid trip. Some critics feel that Xi’s overt display of friendliness to the United States is an effort to protect the Chinese economy. As relations sour, many American companies have been withdrawing operations from China, an economic loss some say China is looking to repair.
That being said, many American institutions also seem eager to reinstate what was lost during the pandemic with returns to in-person university programs in China. “I think that in the short term, and especially for language study, lots of funding bodies are recognizing the need to undo the damage that the COVID pandemic caused on younger scholars,” said Szonyi.
But Szonyi predicts that within the U.S., students will experience changes in how they are encouraged to study China. “I expect that it’s going to be in the long run easier and easier to study China as a security threat to the United States—that there will be funding available for that—and harder and harder to study China as an interesting example in the history of museums or in the history of revolutions or in the history of health, and so on.”
Andrew DeWeese, whose interests lie in foreign policy and national security, may represent the growing body of scholars Szonyi predicted. As DeWeese approaches his year in Beijing, he is apprehensive about being caught up in the political tension. “When you’re a citizen of a state that a repressive state doesn’t like, you can always get caught up in something bigger than yourself,” he said. “When tensions between the two governments sour, people like us become easy to blame.”