Chinese-American Scholars and Sino-U.S. Rivalry: Where Do We Go From Here?

Over its one hundred-fifty year history, scholarly exchange between China and the United States has been a bargain in which China attained knowledge of the natural, applied, and social sciences to support its modernization and the United States gained access to a large talent pool.[1] It was not merely a transmission of expertise from master to apprentice, however; from the outset, Chinese who studied in America (and Japan and Europe) became leaders in their disciplines and contributed to American innovation and the advancement of global knowledge. Many of these scholars built successful careers while accurately perceiving themselves as both American and Chinese—culturally, professionally, and politically. This essay asks whether they can still work in the same spirit now that China and the United States are long-term rivals.

The Twilight of Engagement

When President Carter and Deng Xiaoping normalized relations in 1979, they gave implicit permission for ordinary Chinese and Americans to view each other through non-political lenses for the first time in thirty years. The U.S. and China had been estranged since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. American educators, missionaries, executives, and adventurers who had been scattered across China went home in 1949.  Some Chinese academics who had trained in the U.S. traveled back across the Pacific to build the New China. Security concerns—politics—were the sum total of the relationship for most of the Cold War. Then, in 1979, Chinese and Americans were suddenly free to treat each other as scholars, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs again, rather than as pasteboard representatives of enemy states.  Politics did not vanish in the Engagement Era,[2] especially on the Chinese side, but its effective scope in U.S.-China relations was greatly reduced. In this environment, academic exchanges flourished, to the benefit of both nations.

In the first decades of Engagement, Beijing and Washington encouraged the two-way flow of scholars. In the 1980s, the University Affiliations program of the Reagan administration’s United States Information Agency funded Chinese academics whose visits to the United States might spur the creation of joint institutes and laboratories. Chinese scholars who became professors, chairs, deans, and presidents in U.S. universities were rewarded for promoting joint research with Chinese counterparts. Until recently, the U.S. higher educational system’s ability to attract Chinese students was seen in Washington as an index of American soft power and a clear win for the home side.

Beginning from a lower economic baseline, China naturally gained more from Engagement than the United States. Nonetheless, America’s dividend—the influx of a new generation of Chinese-American talent—was immeasurable. The Economist Intelligence Unit and The Committee of 100 teamed up in 2020 to document the impact of Chinese-Americans on American arts and culture, civil rights, public service, entrepreneurship, infrastructure, national security affairs, public health, and science and technology.[3] The Economist report, From Foundations to Frontiers, provides strong validation of U.S. educational exchange policy during the Engagement Era and serves as a warning about what might be lost now that the era is over.      

The cause of Engagement’s demise is widely debated. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim is that the U.S. killed Engagement due to hostility toward a risen China and doomed adherence to the illusion of American primacy. Great power rivalry and America’s fear of decline are part of the story, but there is another explanation for American concerns: Engagement became untenable because China changed.

Since 2013 Xi Jinping’s radical re-politicization of Chinese institutions has required that China’s foreign partners either accept the CCP’s benign self-assessments at face value, or weigh the implications of engaging with China in light of Beijing’s domestic repression and aggression abroad. Under Engagement, the United States helped build China’s academic and scientific capacity for the sake of its modernization, but it has no interest in building China’s global power. Because the CCP now treats education and technology, and Reform and Openness more generally, as instruments of power, other nations must base their engagement with China on judgments about the implications of Chinese power for themselves.[4] Politics is again at the fore.

Chinese Higher Education in the Xi Era

In America, re-politicization of U.S.-China relations has resulted in a wave of prosecutions under the Department of Justice’s China Initiative. The effort has snared a few bad actors, but also harmed the careers of a growing number of innocent academics. The China Initiative’s missteps, including a propensity for racial profiling, are the fault of its American administrators. The core rationale for the program, however, is neither racist nor unreasonable. Like the death of Engagement, the origins of The China Initiative lie in China’s changes under Xi Jinping

On October 18, 2017, in a speech to the 19^th Party Congress, Xi proclaimed “In Party, political, military, civil, and academic affairs; North, south east, west, and center, the Party leads everything.” The line has become the iconic expression of Xi’s insistence that the Party control all aspects of Chinese life. It makes clear that education is an existential issue for the CCP, on a par with, and inseparable from, national security.

The centrality of education to Xi’s agenda was evident early in his tenure. On January 19, 2015, after the Seven Proscribed Topics (七不准) of Document 9 made combatting liberalism a Chinese national security priority,[5] the Party issued Document 30, Opinions Concerning Further Strengthening and Improving Propaganda and Ideology Work in Higher Education Under New Circumstances. Document 30 contained the text of speeches given by Xi in 2014, in which he demanded, “strengthened party control and the cleansing of Western-inspired liberal ideas from universities.”[6] For Chinese academics, who had created a surprising amount of space for critical thinking and open discussion during the twenty-five years since Tiananmen, Document 30 marked the end of an era.   

On January 20, 2015, China’s Minister of Education, Yuan Guiren, met with university leaders to give them guidance for propaganda work under the “New Circumstances.” He urged them to “strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials”—meaning they should eschew Western texts—and to “by no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.” He told academic administrators to “never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students,” and to make sure that the ideas of Chairman Xi “enter teaching materials, enter classrooms, and enter minds” of students.”[7]

A few scholars pushed back, briefly. Shen Kui (沈岿), of the Peking University Law School, wrote a Frontiers of Law blog asking Yuan Guiren three questions: How could Western and Chinese values be distinguished when Marxism came from the West? How could academics tell the difference between “attacking and slandering the Party’s leadership and blackening socialism,” which was forbidden, and “reflecting on the bends in the road in the Party’s past and exposing dark facts,” which was encouraged? Under what laws and constitutional provisions would the new rules be implemented?[8] In the February 10, 2015 edition of the People’s Daily, Gong Ke (龚克), President of Nankai University, wrote, “Recently, I’ve read people on the Internet saying that the ranks of academics must be cleansed, purified, and rectified. I cannot agree with this. This was the mentality of 1957 or 1966.” The dates referred to Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign and Cultural Revolution, during which thousands of Chinese academics were persecuted and killed.

Scholars like Shen and Gong were attacked by the CCP’s theoretical journal, Qiushi and by Zhu Jidong (朱继东), Deputy Director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ State Cultural Security and Ideology Construction Research Center, who wrote that, “China’s socialist universities absolutely cannot allow such speech to appear in university classrooms and we cannot allow it to appear in any form anywhere on our campuses.”[9] The state-run Global Times wrote: “The transmission of negative political energy on campuses should be despised. Those who speak with positive energy but whose behavior is ugly are in fact ‘extremely black’.”[10] Positive energy (正能量) is a Xi-ist slogan connoting enthusiastic support for the Party. Calling faculty “black” associated them with the Five Black Categories of the Cultural Revolution—people who could be righteously murdered for their beliefs.   

By 2016, Xi’s control of China’s universities was complete. No critiques of his educational policies have been published in China for several years. China’s intellectuals, long honored as the conscience of the nation, have been co-opted or cowed into silence. In 2019, Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the top three schools in China, dropped guarantees of “academic independence and freedom of thought” from its charter.[11] China was no longer part of the free and open global system of intellectual exchange.

Xi’s insistence that universities serve not only the nation’s development, but its comprehensive national power (国家综合实力) as well, did not escape the notice of American security agencies. Americans had already been alarmed by China’s rapid military buildup, its buildout and militarization of islands in the South China Sea, and its flouting of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 finding that PRC territorial claims in the region had no merit. Against this background, they were not inclined to see the Red educational wave as a harmless development. Washington’s suspicion of the role of China’s universities and technologists in building China’s national power was exacerbated by a series of CCP policies, including the Indigenous Innovation agenda launched in 2006,[12] the Made in China 2025 program announced in 2015, the buttressing of Military-Civil Fusion policies that dated back to the 1990s, and a series of National Intelligence Laws[13] that required Chinese entities, including universities, to give the Chinese state any information it requested.

The strategic logic of these programs was explained to the satisfaction of many American lawmakers, especially on the Republican side of the aisle, by Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower. Published in 2015, the book claimed that China had a secret plan to eclipse the United States and dominate a new global order.[14] Everything Xi did advanced that agenda.[15]   

Beijing’s rhetoric added fuel to the fire simmering in DC. In 2014, during the Seventh Conference on Friendship with Overseas Chinese Associations, Xi Jinping said, “There are tens of millions of overseas Chinese in the world, and every one is a member of the Chinese family. For a long time, generation after generation of overseas Chinese have upheld the great traditions of the Chinese nation and have not forgotten the motherland, their ancestral homeland, or the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their bodies.”[16] He has called on ethnic Chinese to contribute to the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation, regardless of their countries of citizenship, many times since. In the spring of 2017, Premier, Li Keqiang, said, “It is the duty of all people of Chinese descent to help achieve the investment, technological development, and trade goals of the People’s Republic of China.”[17] 

After Li’s speech, the U.S. Congress and national security agencies paid greater attention to Chinese talent re-recruitment efforts, like the Thousand Talents Program.[18] These programs, which had been around for a decade and were not illegal, offered monetary and reputational incentives to American academics, including Chinese-Americans, who agreed to lend their expertise to Chinese universities either full-time or during summer and winter breaks.

The stage was set. Washington’s knowledge of Chinese intelligence methods, the hyper-politicization of education under Xi Jinping, and Chinese statements that put a target on the backs of Chinese academics worldwide were about to cause a tempest on U.S. campuses.

America Panics

The September 2017 publication of Anne Marie Brady’s Magic Weapons[19] raised alarm bells in the U.S. about the means by which Beijing attempted to influence public opinion and overseas Chinese communities. Arriving five years after the ascent of Xi Jinping and one year after the victory of Donald Trump, who campaigned on the claim that China had “raped” the United States, Brady’s warnings about Chinese infiltration fell on ready ears. Had she written Magic Weapons ten years earlier, when her analysis of China’s United Front would have been equally apt, she would have been ignored as a Cassandra. In 2017, she was hailed as Paul Revere.

Brady’s message was amplified by the December 2017 publication of the National Endowment for Democracy’s, Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence, which convinced many readers that Chinese and Russian influence operations were more insidious than traditional soft power campaigns.[20] Later the same month, Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy named China and Russia as revisionist powers and China as the United States’ greatest strategic challenge—a threat more concerning than terrorism.[21] 

The implications for American universities and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, faculty, researchers, and visiting scholars who toiled in them were signaled on February 13, 2018, in FBI director Christopher Wray’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. When Senator Marco Rubio asked him to comment on “the counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics,” Wray answered: