Recent visits to China by officials from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden have featured attempts to broaden out the U.S.-China relationship beyond the tensions on display between the two governments. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made Chinese cuisine a central part of her last two trips to Beijing, hosting a lunch with an all-female lineup of Chinese economists on one occasion and dining on famous Yunnan mushroom dishes on another. On his visit last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took in some basketball and bought albums at a local Beijing record store.
Both trips sought to humanize the bilateral relationship and perhaps signal to the Chinese people that Americans have a fondness for all sorts of things about China, even if that doesn’t extend to its government. As with the U.S. Congress’ Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, these are attempts to distinguish the CCP from the Chinese people. With limited access to uncensored information in China and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries at very low levels, this is harder than perhaps ever before.
The problem of people-to-people exchange is much more severe on the U.S. side. Despite increased bilateral tensions and fears in China about gun violence and anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S., nearly 300,000 Chinese students still elect to study at U.S. universities each year. By contrast, the number of U.S. students studying in China has plummeted to new lows since the pandemic, with only about 900 U.S. students currently in China. As Blinken noted in his departing press conference, this imbalance creates a knowledge gap about China in the U.S. that will affect the new generation of policymakers, diplomats and analysts. And given current tensions and potential areas of conflict—from China’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to its role in the U.S. fentanyl epidemic—expertise on China is badly needed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping sought to address this shortfall at the APEC Summit in San Francisco last November, announcing the ambitious goal of attracting 50,000 U.S. students to China over the next five years. Since then, anecdotal accounts suggest that Chinese universities have been given numerical quotas to realize this goal in an all-out effort to bring more Americans to their campuses. As a result, U.S. academics and students are being courted to attend short, all-expenses-paid trips to China.
For Chinese university administrators, the need to reach the 50,000 target is now clearly more important than whether these visits achieve the goal of enhancing mutual understanding or increasing knowledge. After a visit to the NYU-Shanghai campus on April 25, Blinken posted a call on X for “responsible exchanges with China that would enable more Americans to study there, building connections between our peoples.” His remarks seemed like an indirect rebuke to formalistic attempts to solve the problem.
It’s worth looking at this effort to achieve targets in the educational realm, as the dynamic is similar to what we see in other areas of Chinese policymaking. Overcapacity in production of electric vehicles, or EVs, was in part produced by a similar dynamic, as I discussed in an earlier column. The central government announced ambitious goals in new technologies and encouraged local governments and firms to meet them. Local actors are particularly responsive to such goals when they can be used to generate subsidies and easy credit from state banks. Success in meeting them might also mean promotion and advancement for local bureaucrats.
When it comes to people-to-people exchange, the U.S. shouldn’t delegate the work of improving relations only to China.
There will be no overcapacity, however, when it comes to U.S. students studying in China. The 50,000 target will not be reached, or else it will be reached through formalistic and performative subterfuge. So why does this governance style work in one realm, such as green energy, but fail in another, such as people-to-people exchange?
Overcapacity is the product of a system that uses top-down goals to motivate local performance. This system can also generate waste and redundancy, as too many local actors do the same thing. And it can lead to what Xi has criticized as “formalism and bureaucratism,” when local compliance hits the quantitative target but doesn’t advance Beijing’s strategic goals, resulting in quantity over quality, form over substance.
In thinking through why Chinese policymaking can appear to be wildly successful in one realm and a dud in another, it’s important to understand two important factors: the costs and benefits of the policy to the local units charged with implementing it. In the case of technological innovation in green energy, the central government’s exhortation to invest and build new technologies sent a clear message to local officials to fund these sectors. State subsidies and bank credit became plentiful, because successful local firms could bring political glory, employment growth and new tax revenue. Recognition by Beijing can also improve the promotion prospects of ambitious local officials. These policies generate “win-win” incentives for the center and localities alike.
There are risks, but they are often ignored. Amid growing overcapacity and fierce competition on EV prices, there are likely to be losers down the road. Thus, even when successful, this policymaking style tends to produce boom and bust cycles, such as what is now playing out in China’s real estate sector.
In education, however, the 50,000 target generates little upside for universities and some significant risk. U.S. students dislike China’s internet restrictions and are accustomed to an open academic environment that is now exceedingly rare on Chinese campuses. Their presence can lead to controversies over freedom of _expression_ and what can and cannot be said in class. Amid rising anti-Americanism, there is the possibility of clashes between students. And unlike green energy, there are no significant economic benefits of academic exchange, especially when many of these new programs are completely financed by the Chinese side. In other words, the 50,000 target is just another unfunded mandate from the central government. As a result, in this case, one can expect to see formalistic compliance without much substantive change in the state of people-to-people exchange.
How can people-to-people exchange be improved? Most importantly, the U.S. shouldn’t delegate the work of improving relations only to China. Instead, it could restore its own programs that were canceled during the administration of former President Donald Trump, especially the Fulbright Program to China and Hong Kong, and the Peace Corps. Delegating these goals to China promotes the very formalistic compliance that we should reject. Moreover, it ensures that U.S. students going to China on China’s dime will be treated to censored trips and staged engagement.
But it also means paying attention to the experience of Chinese students attending U.S. universities. Over the past few weeks, that has meant the wave of student protests against the war in Gaza—and the decision by many university administrators to resort to police crackdowns to dismantle those protests. I’ll be looking at the implications of these protests on people-to-people exchange in my next column two weeks from now.
Mary E. Gallagher is the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights Professor at the University of Michigan, where she is also the director of the International Institute. She was the director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies from 2008-2020. Her WPR column appears every other Tuesday.