The recent meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in California was heralded as an initial attempt to thaw relations. As part of that broader effort, both sides expressed interest in expanding educational exchanges. China’s announced goal of hosting 50,000 U.S. students in the next five years looks wildly ambitious compared to the current 211 Americans studying in mainland China today, but ten years ago, as many as 15,000 studied there annually.
The drastic decline of American students in China is creating an expertise gap that threatens the United States’ long-term ability to navigate the complexities of the China-U.S. geopolitical landscape. CLICK HERE to continue reading this article.
It often comes as a surprise to most Americans when they learn that the first country to participate in the Fulbright program was not the United Kingdom, where the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships send students, or even a country in Europe. Rather it was China. And it would be Derk Bodde, a Chinese historian, fluent in Mandarin, who would earn the title of America’s first Fulbright scholar.
Soon after the U.S. and China signed the Fulbright agreement on November 10, 1947, Bodde wrote to the Fulbright Board. For months he heard little. But in March 1948, the Fulbright Board called Bodde, asking if he would accept a scholarship to China. The Board needed an immediate response since it planned to issue a press release that day announcing that the Fulbright program had begun. Bodde replied yes and five months later he, his wife and eight-year-old son were on a boat to Beijing. “Such was the unorthodox beginning to an unorthodox journey which was to culminate in a decidedly unorthodox year in China” Bodde would recount two years later in his memoir, Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution
Bodde’s time in Beijing would be unorthodox because he, and the 20 other China Fulbrighters, arrived as China was in the midst of a civil war. When World War II ended in 1945, so too did the ceasefire between the ruling Nationalist party (“Guomindang” or “KMT”) and the insurgent Chinese Communists. By the time Bodde arrived in August 1948, Beijing was on the cusp of falling into Communist hands, an event that occurred on January 23, 1949, midway through his time there.
But Bodde would complete his full Fulbright year and would share his experiences in his 1950 memoir, Peking Diary. With accounts showing the efficacy of the Communists’ initial rule in Beijing – clamping down on run-away inflation, adding order to a society that had gone astray, returning students back to classes, promising an end to government corruption, and responding to the people’s grievances – Peking Diary was instrumental in explaining why the people of Beijing readily accepted Communist rule. Bodde, reading various Chinese newspapers daily, also reported that the Communist takeover in China was not some Soviet-led effort, the reigning orthodoxy of Washington, D.C foreign policy circles. Instead, Bodde saw the Chinese Communist revolution as uniquely Chinese, a response to the deep problems plaguing Chinese society. U.S. policymakers ignored this reality at their peril Bodde maintained.
People’s Liberation Army enters Beijing, January 1949
Peking Diary, with its eyewitness account from an American fluent in Mandarin and familiar with the culture, shows just how foolish the Trump Administration was to terminate the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs, an action it took in its July 14, 2020 Executive Order. The Fulbright program has been vital in deepening U.S. policymakers’ understanding of China, with Fulbrighters returning from the country, sharing their experiences and their perspectives. Bodde is just one. More recent China Fulbright scholars have testified before Congress, have published op-eds, have written various reports and have broken the story of the mass internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. All of these efforts gives U.S. policymakers a much more nuanced perspective of China.
Senator J. William Fulbright, the architect of the program, never wanted it to be used to promote the U.S. government’s foreign policy goals such as providing information to government policymakers. For him, the Fulbright program had one goal: world peace through the humanizing of other cultures and people. “If international education is to advance these aims – of perception and perspective, of empathy and the humanizing of international relations – it cannot be treated as a conventional instrument of a nation’s foreign policy. Most emphatically, it cannot be treated as a propaganda program designed to ‘improve the image’ of a country. . . .” Fulbright told an audience in 1967, after seeing his program exploited during the Cold War for U.S. foreign policy goals.
Mutual understanding of other cultures, which in turn fosters peace among people, is and should remain the Fulbright program’s primary purpose. But as much as Senator Fulbright may not agree, we can’t ignore that the program does serve to educate the U.S. government in understanding a country that for the last 40 years has been in a state of constant transformation.
But, with the termination of the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs, we lose this crucial information source when we need it most. For the first time in recent history, China is emerging on the world stage, not to play a bit part but to be the director of the show. It’s imposition of the Hong Kong National Security Law, which ignores its obligations under international treaties and disregards Hong Kong law, reflect that fact. Today, one could imagine another “Diary” written by a Fulbright fellow except this diary would be situated in Hong Kong with a people rejecting Communist rule instead of welcoming it. Unfortunately, with the Fulbright program terminated in Hong Kong and China, that book will not be written.
What we could be missing out on without Fulbrighters in Hong Kong – eye witnesses to the protests
If world peace alone is an insufficient reason for the Biden administration to reinstate the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs, our own self-interest should be enough. The knowledge that Fulbright fellows bring back to the United States is vital to the country’s interests and its national security. The Biden administration must modify the July 14 Executive Order by revoking the provision terminating the Fulbright program in China and Hong Kong. Why would we put ourselves at a disadvantage?
All the Fulbright countries are highlighted in orange. Map is only current through July 13, 2020.
Last Wednesday, SupChina published our oped calling on the Biden administration to restore the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs, both terminated by the Trump Administration’s July 14, 2020 Executive Order. As we noted in the article, prior to that termination, the United States had been sending approximately 200 Americans every year to China on the Fulbright program and China was sending more than 100 Chinese citizens to the U.S. as Fulbrighters. Since the United States resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1979, the United States has sent 3,556 Americans to China on a Fulbright and China has sent 1,545 Chinese scholars to the U.S.
These numbers come from an analysis of the Fulbright annual reports, published between 1978 and 2016, which China Law & Policy reviewed and made a summary excel spreadsheet of the number of Fulbrighters, broken down by year (see below). The spreadsheet also includes an analysis of the Chinese government’s annual contribution to the Fulbright program.
The annual reports for 2004 to 2016 are available on the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ (ECA) website here. After China Law & Policy made a request to ECA for the pre-2004 reports, ECA provided us with all the reports dating back to 1959. We have uploaded the Fulbright annual reports here from 1979 to 2003 here. Unfortunately, for the last three years the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board has failed to fulfill its Congressional-mandate of publishing an annual report and thus, the last report is from the 2016 academic year.
How to Read the China Fulbright Excel Workbook
You can download the Excel Workbook below or view it in the embedded document. Note that the Workbook has three sheets, the first shows the number of U.S. citizens sent to China, broken down by the various different sub-programs covered by the Fulbright program. Sheet two is the number of Chinese citizens sent to the U.S., also broken down by Fulbright sub-program. For both of these sheets, the right most column lists the total number of Fulbrighters by year. The bottom of the right most column totals the number of China Fulbrighters between 1978 and 2016.
You are welcome to use these numbers as you see fit but we would appreciate it if you could cite to China Law & Policy if you use this excel spreadsheet or the data we collected.
It was 1999, and for the Fulbright program, Nickolas Zaller and I were pioneers. Never before had China hosted recently-graduated college students on the Fulbright program, and it only permitted five of us to come that August for a year-long fellowship. The following year, 26 U.S. students went to China on a Fulbright, and for the last 15 years, that number has hovered around 50 annually.
But earlier this year, on July 14, with neither explanation nor warning — and buried deep in an Executive Order addressing the legal status of Hong Kong under U.S. law — the Trump Administration terminated the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs. . . .
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