This page is not about economics. I really don’t know whether President Trump will put a 100% tariff on goods coming from China or whether China will use its enormous reserve of rare earth minerals as a bargaining chip with us. What I do know, however, is that China-U.S. relations will dominate global politics for many decades to come.
Right now, the U.S. and China are drifting apart. We know less and less about each other, and I fear this may be getting worse. Remember, back in the 1950s and 1960s Russia was Enemy #1. There was suspicion, fear, and competition on both sides. It’s estimated that in those two decades fewer than 1,000 Americans studied in Russia. We didn’t know them, their culture or their language, and they didn’t know us, and this was not a very good script for bilateral relations.
There are signs that things are developing this way with China. Fewer Americans are studying in China, fewer Americans are learning Mandarin, and the heyday of Chinese families paying full freight to send their kids to American colleges (and high schools too) seems to be over. China has for years been the leading foreign sender of students to U.S. colleges. The total peaked in 2020 at 373,000. The number of Chinese students in U.S. colleges is now down 25%. India has jumped to the top rung of countries with students here.
Chinese media is heavily censored. Good news about America is rare, but every crime against a Chinese student in America is front page news for days. President Trump is referred to in China as “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump the Nation Builder” – not because he is making America great.Just the opposite, he is running America into the ground and forcing China to develop even faster! Both sides are less inclined to learn about the other.
The all-important Chinese college exam, the Gaokao, has started to deemphasize English, and according to EF Education First, an English language training firm, China has fallen from 38th to 91st among 116 countries in its English proficiency. Maybe it has to do with anti-American sentiment or maybe it’s due to the rise in translation apps, but this is not good for global understanding.
American college students are also showing less interest in China. As recently as 2019 there were 11,000 U.S. students studying at Chinese colleges. Today that number is down to a mere 500. And on the tourism front, The Economist reports that the number of visitors from America to China is down by two-thirds since 2019. Covid has obviously had something to do with this, but I can attest from a visit to China a year ago, Europeans are there, and Asians too,
but no Americans.
There are some positive signs here, however. The U.S. China Education Trust found in a survey that over three quarters of Chinese students who have come here to study say they enjoyed it and would do it again. And here in the U.S. many students are studying Mandarin even though they are not travelling across the Pacific to do it. Thomas Friedman noted in The New York Times recently that when Taylor Swift released her “Lover” album in 2019, there were one million combined streams, downloads, and sales in China within a week – the most ever for a foreign artist. Let’s hope China-U.S. relations develop positively. We don’t need another Cold War.
