Training China's New Elite
American education seems bound to have a significant impact on the People's Republic of China, which is sending the cream of its intelligentsia and the children of its leaders here to study in record numbers.
by Fred Strebeigh
Atlantic, April 1989
Atlantic, April 1989
AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, IN AN OAK-PANELED AND stained-glassed seminar room that seems to have been lifted from Princeton or Yale, thirteen scholars from the People's Republic of China are meeting with Geneva Overholser, an editorial writer for the Times. These scholars have been brought to the Times by an American organization called the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, but they are not short-term visitors getting a fast taste of America. They have been living in the United States for at least six months, some for as long as four years, in towns like Somerville, Massachusetts; Columbia, Missouri; and Riverside, California. Most are on leave from professorships, editorships, or chairmanships at prominent Chinese institutions. These visitors are a tiny sample of the tens of thousands of China's future leaders who are living in this country today--and who are engaged, in complex and unprecedented ways, in what could be called the modern Chinese discovery of America.
This morning Overholser (at the time of the visit a member of the Times editorial board, and now the editor of the Des Moines Register) is describing how Times editorials get written. Like her colleagues, Overholser says, she has developed a few specialties; hers are arms control and Russia and China. She has been fielding rapid questions from her Chinese audience. One scholar asks her if she does any research. Oh, yes, Overholser responds, warming to a familiar question. She uses the fine Times library. She telephones overseas correspondents and American Sinologists. She requests clips of published Times articles.
This morning Overholser (at the time of the visit a member of the Times editorial board, and now the editor of the Des Moines Register) is describing how Times editorials get written. Like her colleagues, Overholser says, she has developed a few specialties; hers are arms control and Russia and China. She has been fielding rapid questions from her Chinese audience. One scholar asks her if she does any research. Oh, yes, Overholser responds, warming to a familiar question. She uses the fine Times library. She telephones overseas correspondents and American Sinologists. She requests clips of published Times articles.
Hearing this list of Overholser's resources, Yang Zidi, a pensive man in his late thirties, looks concerned. Do you, he asks her, read Xinhua publications?
Overholser's face shows surprise. Xinhua ("New China") is the official Chinese news agency, and Yang wants to know if Overholser reads the official story.
Yang's question is purposeful. He writes for Xinhua. He has spent most of his professional life explaining Chinese culture to overseas China-watchers. As he told me on another occasion, he has sensed during the past year, which he has spent earning a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia, that many Americans disregard the work he does as a Chinese journalist. And now Overholser has just told him that her job includes watching China and formulating perhaps the most influential of American editorial opinions about it. Does she, too, disregard Xinhua? Will his work in China fail to reach Overholser and the New York Times?
Yang's question presents Overholser with a problem. She does not know if the fine Times library even receives Xinhua publications. She does not hedge about whether she reads China's official press. "I should," she replies. She tells him that she has begun reading reports from Tass, the Soviet news agency, and that they help her understand Russia. She announces a decision: that very afternoon she will find out whether her library gets materials from Xinhua; if not, she'll ask that they be ordered. Yang sits back, having scored a few points for Chinese journalism.
A few moments later different points will be scored. Another scholar asks Overholser, When she writes editorials, to whom does she write?
Usually, to any well-read person, Overholser says--but not always. When, for example, the Senate must vote on an arms-control measure, Overholser will write the Times editorial on the subject. Hoping to influence American foreign policy, she will aim directly at Congress.
This comment brings a question from Zhu Shida. A man of playful and expansive intellect, who has spent the past year as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard studying john Dos Passos, Zhu teaches journalism in an elite graduate program at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Obviously fascinated by this editorialist, who regularly attempts to shape American diplomacy, Zhu stretches his lean frame across the table toward her. He asks: When the New York Times seeks to influence foreign policy, does Congress or the State Department impose guidelines?.
Overholser misunderstands. Yes, she begins, you might say that an editorial writer tries to create "guidelines" to direct the government toward proper policy. She begins to elaborate on the role of editorialist as guide. Someone in the audience gently cuts her off and restates Zhu's question. Overholser does a double take. "Guidelines from Congress or State?" she asks. "Well, they certainly wouldn't dare call them that." Overholser then proceeds, lest she seem naive about editorial freedom or Zhu feel embarrassed by his question, to talk about nongovernmental influences on editorial writing: possibly advertisers, perhaps social milieu, probably herd instinct.
As we walk away from the seminar room, Zhu Shida seems pleased to have heard the Times acknowledge the possibility that its editorials might, even in small ways, be affected by dubious influences. But he seems also to realize that his "guidelines" question departed so much from the reality of U.S. editorial-page procedure that Overholser could not even hear it.
Overholser's face shows surprise. Xinhua ("New China") is the official Chinese news agency, and Yang wants to know if Overholser reads the official story.
Yang's question is purposeful. He writes for Xinhua. He has spent most of his professional life explaining Chinese culture to overseas China-watchers. As he told me on another occasion, he has sensed during the past year, which he has spent earning a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia, that many Americans disregard the work he does as a Chinese journalist. And now Overholser has just told him that her job includes watching China and formulating perhaps the most influential of American editorial opinions about it. Does she, too, disregard Xinhua? Will his work in China fail to reach Overholser and the New York Times?
Yang's question presents Overholser with a problem. She does not know if the fine Times library even receives Xinhua publications. She does not hedge about whether she reads China's official press. "I should," she replies. She tells him that she has begun reading reports from Tass, the Soviet news agency, and that they help her understand Russia. She announces a decision: that very afternoon she will find out whether her library gets materials from Xinhua; if not, she'll ask that they be ordered. Yang sits back, having scored a few points for Chinese journalism.
A few moments later different points will be scored. Another scholar asks Overholser, When she writes editorials, to whom does she write?
Usually, to any well-read person, Overholser says--but not always. When, for example, the Senate must vote on an arms-control measure, Overholser will write the Times editorial on the subject. Hoping to influence American foreign policy, she will aim directly at Congress.
This comment brings a question from Zhu Shida. A man of playful and expansive intellect, who has spent the past year as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard studying john Dos Passos, Zhu teaches journalism in an elite graduate program at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Obviously fascinated by this editorialist, who regularly attempts to shape American diplomacy, Zhu stretches his lean frame across the table toward her. He asks: When the New York Times seeks to influence foreign policy, does Congress or the State Department impose guidelines?.
Overholser misunderstands. Yes, she begins, you might say that an editorial writer tries to create "guidelines" to direct the government toward proper policy. She begins to elaborate on the role of editorialist as guide. Someone in the audience gently cuts her off and restates Zhu's question. Overholser does a double take. "Guidelines from Congress or State?" she asks. "Well, they certainly wouldn't dare call them that." Overholser then proceeds, lest she seem naive about editorial freedom or Zhu feel embarrassed by his question, to talk about nongovernmental influences on editorial writing: possibly advertisers, perhaps social milieu, probably herd instinct.
As we walk away from the seminar room, Zhu Shida seems pleased to have heard the Times acknowledge the possibility that its editorials might, even in small ways, be affected by dubious influences. But he seems also to realize that his "guidelines" question departed so much from the reality of U.S. editorial-page procedure that Overholser could not even hear it.
Zero to Thirty Thousand
SINCE 1982, WHEN I FIRST SERVED AS AN ADVISER to a Chinese scholar who was visiting at Yale University, where I teach, I have witnessed many similar scenes. They usually contain just such a cast of well-informed people, displaying good intentions and betraying mutual ignorance. They reveal the intensity with which two nations separated through much of the last half of this century now struggle to understand each other.
For every scholar in that room at the Times, thousands are now scattered throughout the United States--living in hamlets and suburbs and slums, studying legal theory and laser physics and mass media, meditating on China and America and themselves.
These Chinese visitors range in age from their twenties to their sixties, and in status from undergraduate to full professor or fully accomplished professional. (The Chinese government in official documents tends to describe everyone whom it sends to the United States as a "student" and to make its most significant distinction between "officially sponsored" students, who receive some government or institutional funding and whom it attempts to control, and "self-sponsored" students, who pay their own way, usually with the help of friends or family abroad, and remain free of state control. American university administrators and individual Chinese visitors tend to distinguish between "students," who enroll in degree programs, and "scholars," who conduct research but do not enroll, a distinction I will observe.)
These visitors constitute the largest national group of foreign students and scholars now residing in the United States--they probably number more than 30,000. They also constitute the largest such group ever sent by a Communist nation to a Western one. In 1987-1988, the last year for which figures are available, the Soviet Union had fewer than a hundred students in the United States, and no other Communist nation had more than 1,900. The number of students and scholars from China who have studied in the United States in this decade--50,000--already exceeds the number who received training in the United States in the century prior to the creation of the People's Republic of China, in 1949, and greatly exceeds those trained in the Soviet Union since 1949.
But historical comparisons alone miss the impact of this cultural exchange on Chinese life. China today has approximately 120,000 graduate students within its borders, whereas it has some 20,000 enrolled here. Moreover, through national exams and institutional selection, China directs official support for overseas study to the cream of its intelligentsia--to an extent unprecedented among other nations. The selection process brings to America not just the Chinese scholarly elite but also the power elite. Douglas Murray, until recently the president of the China Institute in America, says, "Every Chinese leader seems to have a son or daughter in the United States."
These scholars and students, then, have importance beyond their numbers. For they likely represent a large segment of China's next generation of intellectual leadership, and perhaps much of the economic and political leadership as well. Their absence at times has so disrupted training in China that, in the words of Wang Ruizhong, the second secretary for education at the Chinese embassy in Washington, Chinese professors have worried that leading universities might become mere "prep schools for study abroad."
For every scholar in that room at the Times, thousands are now scattered throughout the United States--living in hamlets and suburbs and slums, studying legal theory and laser physics and mass media, meditating on China and America and themselves.
These Chinese visitors range in age from their twenties to their sixties, and in status from undergraduate to full professor or fully accomplished professional. (The Chinese government in official documents tends to describe everyone whom it sends to the United States as a "student" and to make its most significant distinction between "officially sponsored" students, who receive some government or institutional funding and whom it attempts to control, and "self-sponsored" students, who pay their own way, usually with the help of friends or family abroad, and remain free of state control. American university administrators and individual Chinese visitors tend to distinguish between "students," who enroll in degree programs, and "scholars," who conduct research but do not enroll, a distinction I will observe.)
These visitors constitute the largest national group of foreign students and scholars now residing in the United States--they probably number more than 30,000. They also constitute the largest such group ever sent by a Communist nation to a Western one. In 1987-1988, the last year for which figures are available, the Soviet Union had fewer than a hundred students in the United States, and no other Communist nation had more than 1,900. The number of students and scholars from China who have studied in the United States in this decade--50,000--already exceeds the number who received training in the United States in the century prior to the creation of the People's Republic of China, in 1949, and greatly exceeds those trained in the Soviet Union since 1949.
But historical comparisons alone miss the impact of this cultural exchange on Chinese life. China today has approximately 120,000 graduate students within its borders, whereas it has some 20,000 enrolled here. Moreover, through national exams and institutional selection, China directs official support for overseas study to the cream of its intelligentsia--to an extent unprecedented among other nations. The selection process brings to America not just the Chinese scholarly elite but also the power elite. Douglas Murray, until recently the president of the China Institute in America, says, "Every Chinese leader seems to have a son or daughter in the United States."
These scholars and students, then, have importance beyond their numbers. For they likely represent a large segment of China's next generation of intellectual leadership, and perhaps much of the economic and political leadership as well. Their absence at times has so disrupted training in China that, in the words of Wang Ruizhong, the second secretary for education at the Chinese embassy in Washington, Chinese professors have worried that leading universities might become mere "prep schools for study abroad."
MOST AMERICANS WHO LEARN THAT TENS OF THOUSANDS of students from China are enrolled in this country seem astonished. They should be. None of the first American advocates for inviting Chinese students anticipated the current numbers of them. At the China Institute, Douglas Murray showed me an article he had published in 1976 in the Annals of tile American Academy of Political and Social Science. It predicted that once China began to send students to the United States, "it would be overly optimistic to expect more than a few dozen per year."
Three years later, just before the reopening of formal Sino-American diplomatic relations, China made a surprising announcement: it wanted to send at least 500 students and scholars to American universities, beginning immediately, and it wanted its students to be free, like entrepreneurs, to wheel and deal among dozens of American universities. Many American schools, lured, perhaps, by the exotic or by missionary impulses or by the prospect of additional tuition, opened their arms to China. By 1983 about a hundred American colleges and universities had set up exchanges with China. These connected such institutions as Harvard University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Oberlin College and Shanxi Agricultural University, the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Business and the Beijing Institute of Foreign Trade.
The welcome continued warm when Chinese students, particularly in the sciences, proved exemplary. In a survey of university officials, 44 percent reported that the grades of Chinese graduate students were better than those of graduate students as a whole. The excellence of Chinese graduate students in physics, for example, has led American professors to rely on them as teaching and research assistants and American students to complain that they are distorting the grade curve. University departments such as physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering now rely increasingly on Chinese talent, says Michael Holcomb, a graduate admissions officer at Rutgers University, which has approximately 350 Chinese students and scholars, and as a result "some programs have become hostages."
Because Chinese scientists contribute so much, they find American universities willing to support them financially. Although at first the Chinese government paid more than half the cost of sending students and scholars to the United States, by 1985 American universities paid 57 percent and the Chinese government only 17 percent of the $133 million spent for officially sponsored Chinese students and scholars in the United States, according to Leo A. Orleans, the author of a recent study titled Chinese Students in America: Policies, Issues, and Numbers, sponsored by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC.
If America's reasons for welcoming Chinese scholars seem complex and mutable, China's reasons for sending them seem straightforward and steady. At the national leve1 officials proclaim that China needs well-trained intellectuals to assist its Four Modernizations (in agriculture, industry, science, and defense). At the institutional and individual levels students and scholars speak of enhancing their knowledge, technology, methods, and prestige.
Though straightforward, these reasons fail to explain why the number of Chinese studying in the United States has surged from zero to 30,000 in only ten years. This human outpouring implicitly acknowledges the squandering of intellectual resources during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966.
When I asked Jay Henderson, of the Institute of International Education, why China had turned so decisively to Western education, he said, "They didn't have much other choice, because their domestic education system had been destroyed."
Henderson, who directs the institute's offices in Southeast Asia, explained, "China is a poor country. It's a country that from 1849 to 1949 ate the leaves off the trees and the grass off the ground, and was addicted to opium, and was the victim of every imaginable sort of exploitation. In 1949 the Chinese finally stood up. Then, from 1966 to 1976, they suffered the Cultural Revolution, and went almost totally out of control."
A large body of Chinese narrative, called "scar literature," describes that manic decade. Families saw their books burned before their eyes by revolutionary Red Guards. Universities closed and teachers departed for remote regions to learn from peasants and workers about labor and hardship. Old people and young were tortured to death. Famous intellectuals committed suicide rather than endure public criticism for purported crimes. To these horror stories most Chinese scholars in America today add tales of the milder scarring they suffered--as teenagers pulled from school and turned into melon-pickers or railroad-builders, as young professionals pulled from careers and made translators or clerks.
Finally, in the mid-1970s, China reopened its universities and began its Four Modernizations--which demanded trained intellectuals and modern technicians. These demands the Chinese could not meet. "They were in a desperate situation," says Glenn Shive, the Institute of International Education's representative to China. China had lost the "internal capacity to reproduce the next generation of scholars," he says. The old ones were dying or retiring, and few remained to teach.
"They had to do something fast," Shive says. "They had to do something dramatic. And they did, by investing in this study-abroad venture."
Although China's dramatic venture surprised every American who had studied the interaction of Chinese intellectuals with the West, the pattern is not a new one. When a Chinese government first sent students abroad, in 1872, it sent them to the United States, to live with families in New England. Over the succeeding years Chinese students came in waves, flooding and receding. In all years prior to 1954 Chinese students earned more university degrees (13,797) from schools in the United States than from those in any other foreign country, and vastly more doctoral degrees (2,097). By 1964 three quarters of the board members and members of the departmental standing committees of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had Western training. On the basis of such evidence, Mary Bullock, the director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, argues that "the PRC's decision to send thousands of students to the West represents continuity, not a radical departure, in modem China's cultural policy."
Whatever its long-term continuity, China's policy suffers from frequent short-term discontinuities, as the fate of China's initial experiment reveals. In the early 1880s, a decade after it began to send them, China called back its first students from the United States. The Chinese government feared that its investment might yield inadequate returns, in part because some young scholars might stay overseas or become too Westernized.
In 1988, once again ten years after scholars had begun to study in the United States, the same fears seemed to strike the Chinese government. In March the New York Times reported that China planned "a drastic reduction in the number of its students abroad, especially in the United States." The Chinese government, the Times continued, feared that "too many young scholars may stay overseas or become too Westernized."
The Times went on to estimate that China might cut the number of new students arriving in the United States to 600 a year, noting that 8,000 had come in 1985 alone. That report alarmed many Chinese students in the United States. More than a thousand signed an open letter to the Chinese government expressing concern over the proposed reduction in numbers and objecting to new regulations that limited the number of years that government sponsored students may study in the United States (two years for a master's degree, five for a doctorate).
The Times estimate that only 600 students would arrive in 1988 now seems misleading. Although China's State Education Commission did send the United States only 600 of the 3,000 students that it sent worldwide, an array of Chinese universities and academies sent another 4,000 students, out of 5,000 worldwide. In addition, according to the Institute of International Education, 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese students who paid their own way and thus were free of government control came to the United States. The United States, then, saw at least 6,600 new Chinese students arrive for the academic year 1988-1989.
Three years later, just before the reopening of formal Sino-American diplomatic relations, China made a surprising announcement: it wanted to send at least 500 students and scholars to American universities, beginning immediately, and it wanted its students to be free, like entrepreneurs, to wheel and deal among dozens of American universities. Many American schools, lured, perhaps, by the exotic or by missionary impulses or by the prospect of additional tuition, opened their arms to China. By 1983 about a hundred American colleges and universities had set up exchanges with China. These connected such institutions as Harvard University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Oberlin College and Shanxi Agricultural University, the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Business and the Beijing Institute of Foreign Trade.
The welcome continued warm when Chinese students, particularly in the sciences, proved exemplary. In a survey of university officials, 44 percent reported that the grades of Chinese graduate students were better than those of graduate students as a whole. The excellence of Chinese graduate students in physics, for example, has led American professors to rely on them as teaching and research assistants and American students to complain that they are distorting the grade curve. University departments such as physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering now rely increasingly on Chinese talent, says Michael Holcomb, a graduate admissions officer at Rutgers University, which has approximately 350 Chinese students and scholars, and as a result "some programs have become hostages."
Because Chinese scientists contribute so much, they find American universities willing to support them financially. Although at first the Chinese government paid more than half the cost of sending students and scholars to the United States, by 1985 American universities paid 57 percent and the Chinese government only 17 percent of the $133 million spent for officially sponsored Chinese students and scholars in the United States, according to Leo A. Orleans, the author of a recent study titled Chinese Students in America: Policies, Issues, and Numbers, sponsored by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC.
If America's reasons for welcoming Chinese scholars seem complex and mutable, China's reasons for sending them seem straightforward and steady. At the national leve1 officials proclaim that China needs well-trained intellectuals to assist its Four Modernizations (in agriculture, industry, science, and defense). At the institutional and individual levels students and scholars speak of enhancing their knowledge, technology, methods, and prestige.
Though straightforward, these reasons fail to explain why the number of Chinese studying in the United States has surged from zero to 30,000 in only ten years. This human outpouring implicitly acknowledges the squandering of intellectual resources during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966.
When I asked Jay Henderson, of the Institute of International Education, why China had turned so decisively to Western education, he said, "They didn't have much other choice, because their domestic education system had been destroyed."
Henderson, who directs the institute's offices in Southeast Asia, explained, "China is a poor country. It's a country that from 1849 to 1949 ate the leaves off the trees and the grass off the ground, and was addicted to opium, and was the victim of every imaginable sort of exploitation. In 1949 the Chinese finally stood up. Then, from 1966 to 1976, they suffered the Cultural Revolution, and went almost totally out of control."
A large body of Chinese narrative, called "scar literature," describes that manic decade. Families saw their books burned before their eyes by revolutionary Red Guards. Universities closed and teachers departed for remote regions to learn from peasants and workers about labor and hardship. Old people and young were tortured to death. Famous intellectuals committed suicide rather than endure public criticism for purported crimes. To these horror stories most Chinese scholars in America today add tales of the milder scarring they suffered--as teenagers pulled from school and turned into melon-pickers or railroad-builders, as young professionals pulled from careers and made translators or clerks.
Finally, in the mid-1970s, China reopened its universities and began its Four Modernizations--which demanded trained intellectuals and modern technicians. These demands the Chinese could not meet. "They were in a desperate situation," says Glenn Shive, the Institute of International Education's representative to China. China had lost the "internal capacity to reproduce the next generation of scholars," he says. The old ones were dying or retiring, and few remained to teach.
"They had to do something fast," Shive says. "They had to do something dramatic. And they did, by investing in this study-abroad venture."
Although China's dramatic venture surprised every American who had studied the interaction of Chinese intellectuals with the West, the pattern is not a new one. When a Chinese government first sent students abroad, in 1872, it sent them to the United States, to live with families in New England. Over the succeeding years Chinese students came in waves, flooding and receding. In all years prior to 1954 Chinese students earned more university degrees (13,797) from schools in the United States than from those in any other foreign country, and vastly more doctoral degrees (2,097). By 1964 three quarters of the board members and members of the departmental standing committees of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had Western training. On the basis of such evidence, Mary Bullock, the director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, argues that "the PRC's decision to send thousands of students to the West represents continuity, not a radical departure, in modem China's cultural policy."
Whatever its long-term continuity, China's policy suffers from frequent short-term discontinuities, as the fate of China's initial experiment reveals. In the early 1880s, a decade after it began to send them, China called back its first students from the United States. The Chinese government feared that its investment might yield inadequate returns, in part because some young scholars might stay overseas or become too Westernized.
In 1988, once again ten years after scholars had begun to study in the United States, the same fears seemed to strike the Chinese government. In March the New York Times reported that China planned "a drastic reduction in the number of its students abroad, especially in the United States." The Chinese government, the Times continued, feared that "too many young scholars may stay overseas or become too Westernized."
The Times went on to estimate that China might cut the number of new students arriving in the United States to 600 a year, noting that 8,000 had come in 1985 alone. That report alarmed many Chinese students in the United States. More than a thousand signed an open letter to the Chinese government expressing concern over the proposed reduction in numbers and objecting to new regulations that limited the number of years that government sponsored students may study in the United States (two years for a master's degree, five for a doctorate).
The Times estimate that only 600 students would arrive in 1988 now seems misleading. Although China's State Education Commission did send the United States only 600 of the 3,000 students that it sent worldwide, an array of Chinese universities and academies sent another 4,000 students, out of 5,000 worldwide. In addition, according to the Institute of International Education, 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese students who paid their own way and thus were free of government control came to the United States. The United States, then, saw at least 6,600 new Chinese students arrive for the academic year 1988-1989.
Sources of Misunderstanding
BECAUSE THE NUMBER OF CHINESE SCHOLARS IS SO large, neither the Chinese nor the U.S. government can easily monitor their activities, much less assess how they are responding to American life. As a result, most information about their experiences is unavoidably anecdotal. The Chinese scholars with whom I have talked most tend to share my interest in the humanities and social sciences, in fields such as law, history, sociology, anthropology, English literature, and American studies, but I have also talked with scholars in, for example, radio engineering, atomic physics, and the history of science. Most are in their thirties and forties, but some are as young as twenty-five or as old as sixty-one. Their stories cannot reflect every experience possible for a Chinese scholar in the United States, but they do offer an illustrative sample of Chinese encounters with America.
Most scholars come here with professional goals foremost in mind. When discussing those goals Chinese scholars speak continually about access to research facilities and materials--facilities for learning American medical practices or experimenting in polymer chemistry, materials for analyzing American diplomacy or studying management techniques. Access to materials often begins in
libraries, and Chinese encounters with great American libraries can be revealing. The first scholar I helped at Yale asked for access to the "English-department library." Because he was studying American writing from the 1960s and 1970s and the Englishdepartment library contained only a few old books, I suggested that he try the university library. He resisted. I did not understand that valuable books at his university were kept in department libraries and made available primarily to faculty members, nor did I understand that some Chinese libraries give full access only to high-ranking officials. Finally he agreed to walk with me to Yale's great Sterling Library, the cathedral-like repository for the main university collection. As we entered its long nave, his worst fears were realized.
He saw vaulted arches, stained-glass windows, but no books at all. Within the nave's convoluted side chapels, students and teachers meandered--but not past bookshelves. They merely paused to make quick notes from cards in thousands of oak files. Turning to me, he insisted that the department library must hold more books.
I explained that the file cards represented millions of volumes on floors above our heads. I got him a library card, found him a study carrel at a window on an upper floor, and left him surrounded by unlimited books. Seldom have I seen an adult so happy.
As well as collecting new materials from America, students and scholars are discovering new scholarly methods and directions for their study of Chinese culture. A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin is working with types of sociological surveys and psychological experiments that are unknown in China. A law student at Yale is doing a comparative study of freedom of speech--"a somewhat sensitive topic," he supposes. At the Center for Advanced Study, at Stanford University, Fu Zhengyuan, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, recently began a study of the determinants of political behavior in Britain, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, including determinants that orthodox Marxist analysis overlooks.
All three studies reveal a desire to go beyond traditional materials and methods. Fu Zhengyuan, for example, speaks critically of the limitations imposed by Marxist analysis. In China, he says, "Marxist analysis is almost a dirty word among intellectuals. To use it means that your mind is sterile. It means that your work is annotational, not at all empirically oriented--that it stems from some hair-splitting scholastic analysis that has no basis in reality." Chinese scholars here seem to share the American desire to do fresh scholarship, in which, as one visiting scholar at Columbia University put it, you "don't have to eat what others have chewed."
The scholars seem attracted not just to openness in materials and methods but also to the open life of many American academics. American academic productivity (driven in part by the publish-or-perish system) and the related mobility of faculty members among universities has reshaped the professional ambitions of Chinese scholars. Glenn Shive, of the Institute of International Education, says that scholars returning to China have become critics of university "deadwood"--"all those professors reading from their aged, yellowing pages of notes." Returning scholars have also often become champions of mobility in the educational system and thus challengers of the fenpei system, which allocates workers through central planning. Scholars visiting America, Shive says, "realize that mobility in this culture is integral to the way sciences have flourished in the West," and blame fenpei rigidity for one of China's deeply felt embarrassments: that no Chinese citizen has yet won a Nobel Prize for work done in China. "The whole personnel system in universities is unstable in China," Shive says, "partly as a result of their experience with the way American universities work. They're really impressed with the way we get our people to teach a lot, and publish a lot, and seek fame and fortune as scholars."
Most scholars come here with professional goals foremost in mind. When discussing those goals Chinese scholars speak continually about access to research facilities and materials--facilities for learning American medical practices or experimenting in polymer chemistry, materials for analyzing American diplomacy or studying management techniques. Access to materials often begins in
libraries, and Chinese encounters with great American libraries can be revealing. The first scholar I helped at Yale asked for access to the "English-department library." Because he was studying American writing from the 1960s and 1970s and the Englishdepartment library contained only a few old books, I suggested that he try the university library. He resisted. I did not understand that valuable books at his university were kept in department libraries and made available primarily to faculty members, nor did I understand that some Chinese libraries give full access only to high-ranking officials. Finally he agreed to walk with me to Yale's great Sterling Library, the cathedral-like repository for the main university collection. As we entered its long nave, his worst fears were realized.
He saw vaulted arches, stained-glass windows, but no books at all. Within the nave's convoluted side chapels, students and teachers meandered--but not past bookshelves. They merely paused to make quick notes from cards in thousands of oak files. Turning to me, he insisted that the department library must hold more books.
I explained that the file cards represented millions of volumes on floors above our heads. I got him a library card, found him a study carrel at a window on an upper floor, and left him surrounded by unlimited books. Seldom have I seen an adult so happy.
As well as collecting new materials from America, students and scholars are discovering new scholarly methods and directions for their study of Chinese culture. A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin is working with types of sociological surveys and psychological experiments that are unknown in China. A law student at Yale is doing a comparative study of freedom of speech--"a somewhat sensitive topic," he supposes. At the Center for Advanced Study, at Stanford University, Fu Zhengyuan, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, recently began a study of the determinants of political behavior in Britain, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, including determinants that orthodox Marxist analysis overlooks.
All three studies reveal a desire to go beyond traditional materials and methods. Fu Zhengyuan, for example, speaks critically of the limitations imposed by Marxist analysis. In China, he says, "Marxist analysis is almost a dirty word among intellectuals. To use it means that your mind is sterile. It means that your work is annotational, not at all empirically oriented--that it stems from some hair-splitting scholastic analysis that has no basis in reality." Chinese scholars here seem to share the American desire to do fresh scholarship, in which, as one visiting scholar at Columbia University put it, you "don't have to eat what others have chewed."
The scholars seem attracted not just to openness in materials and methods but also to the open life of many American academics. American academic productivity (driven in part by the publish-or-perish system) and the related mobility of faculty members among universities has reshaped the professional ambitions of Chinese scholars. Glenn Shive, of the Institute of International Education, says that scholars returning to China have become critics of university "deadwood"--"all those professors reading from their aged, yellowing pages of notes." Returning scholars have also often become champions of mobility in the educational system and thus challengers of the fenpei system, which allocates workers through central planning. Scholars visiting America, Shive says, "realize that mobility in this culture is integral to the way sciences have flourished in the West," and blame fenpei rigidity for one of China's deeply felt embarrassments: that no Chinese citizen has yet won a Nobel Prize for work done in China. "The whole personnel system in universities is unstable in China," Shive says, "partly as a result of their experience with the way American universities work. They're really impressed with the way we get our people to teach a lot, and publish a lot, and seek fame and fortune as scholars."
Inhospitable Americans
THE ENTHUSIASM SHOWN BY CHINESE SCHOLARS for American professional life rarely extends to the social experiences they have in America. Many of China's most influential visiting scholars feel themselves snubbed or ignored. Some Chinese scholars I interviewed told me that I was the first American who had taken the time to talk with them.
During my first conversation with Ye Xiaoxin, sixty-one years old and a leading law professor at Fudan, one of China's major universities, I suggested we meet again. He seemed startled. "I would like very much to speak with an American," he said. Over tea a few days later, Ye described his efforts to get to know Americans. At Columbia he had approached a number of students whom he had selected carefully: each, he knew, was studying both law and Chinese. He had asked if they might like to talk. The students mentioned exams or other commitments. Politely, all refused him.
Such experiences force scholars to seek interaction in strange places. One visitor at Yale sought conversations in public parks with vagrants, because they would take time to talk. Liu Zongren, who studied at Northwestern University, once pretended he wished to get information from a local high school principal--just to speak English. In his memoir Two Years in the Melting Pot, Liu reported that one can sometimes make small talk with Americans but one can rarely make friends. Deprived of human conversation, some Chinese visitors settle for television. In five months Liu logged 750 hours of TV.
These Chinese experiences evoke American complaints about ostracism in China. What foreigners in Beijing experience "is remote from the life of this city," wrote Fred C. Shapiro in the New Yorker, in December of 1987, adding that even the persistent foreigner who becomes a "friend of China" learns that "the friendship will always be a formal and highly circumspect one." Similarly, a writer in Conde Nast Traveler describes the Chinese instinct as "isolationist" and advises that "even an informal visit to a Chinese home remains a sometimes unobtainable prize for a foreigner."
Contrary to unflattering depictions of their instincts, many Chinese in the United States--perhaps thrilled by expatriation or plagued by loneliness--seem hungry to discuss not just America and China but also ideals and realities, lives and longings. They find, however, that few Americans will listen. One senior Chinese scholar caught the irony perfectly: "When I am at work in Beijing," the scholar said, "American visitors often wish to talk with me. Although I am very busy, I try to give them time. Now I am here and not so busy. No one wants to talk."
During my first conversation with Ye Xiaoxin, sixty-one years old and a leading law professor at Fudan, one of China's major universities, I suggested we meet again. He seemed startled. "I would like very much to speak with an American," he said. Over tea a few days later, Ye described his efforts to get to know Americans. At Columbia he had approached a number of students whom he had selected carefully: each, he knew, was studying both law and Chinese. He had asked if they might like to talk. The students mentioned exams or other commitments. Politely, all refused him.
Such experiences force scholars to seek interaction in strange places. One visitor at Yale sought conversations in public parks with vagrants, because they would take time to talk. Liu Zongren, who studied at Northwestern University, once pretended he wished to get information from a local high school principal--just to speak English. In his memoir Two Years in the Melting Pot, Liu reported that one can sometimes make small talk with Americans but one can rarely make friends. Deprived of human conversation, some Chinese visitors settle for television. In five months Liu logged 750 hours of TV.
These Chinese experiences evoke American complaints about ostracism in China. What foreigners in Beijing experience "is remote from the life of this city," wrote Fred C. Shapiro in the New Yorker, in December of 1987, adding that even the persistent foreigner who becomes a "friend of China" learns that "the friendship will always be a formal and highly circumspect one." Similarly, a writer in Conde Nast Traveler describes the Chinese instinct as "isolationist" and advises that "even an informal visit to a Chinese home remains a sometimes unobtainable prize for a foreigner."
Contrary to unflattering depictions of their instincts, many Chinese in the United States--perhaps thrilled by expatriation or plagued by loneliness--seem hungry to discuss not just America and China but also ideals and realities, lives and longings. They find, however, that few Americans will listen. One senior Chinese scholar caught the irony perfectly: "When I am at work in Beijing," the scholar said, "American visitors often wish to talk with me. Although I am very busy, I try to give them time. Now I am here and not so busy. No one wants to talk."
Better Read Than Fed
THE SOCIAL ISOLATION FELT BY CHINESE SCHOLARS derives in part from economics. The Chinese government provides the students and scholars whom it supports with stipends of $4,800 to $5,400 a year--$400 to $450 a month. This living allowance appalls American university administrators. Marvin Baron, the director of services for international students and scholars at the University of California at Berkeley, and a former president of the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, has complained to the Chinese embassy in Washington, pointing out that his university estimates that graduate students need at least $700 a month--$250 more than China gives its full-fledged scholars.
Although Americans disparage these stipends as minuscule, to Chinese they seem enormous. One month's check for $450 approaches a year's salary at home for most professors. Often the Chinese recipient of such wealth feels obligations like those of an American jackpot winner. He wants his family to benefit also, and the Chinese government accommodates his desire with special arrangements. In one version (details change often) the scholar pays the government $1,500 in American currency. The government waives its import duty (normally 300 to 400 percent) on certain purchases, often referred to as the "eight great items." A lifetime's cache of luxuries then awaits the scholar on his return to China--camera, refrigerator, computer, washer, color television, microwave oven, or whatever. The scholar returns to his family as if he were a winner on Let's Make a Deal.
The scholar's once-in-a-lifetime chance to enrich family and self cuts into his small stipend. To survive, the scholar must live ingeniously. I know one scholar who, horrified by the high cost of American ginger, had a friend smuggle him a year's supply (he brought me a pungent bagful as a present, still moist with the red clay of his province).
Ingenuity, however, goes only so far. It will not buy books or bus fare or admission to cultural events. (The happiest recollections I hear from scholars often include the gift of a theater or intercity bus ticket). Nor will ingenuity allow scholars to escape their isolation. Chinese students who wish to share accommodations with Americans often cannot afford to, even in the crowded and run-down apartments surrounding major universities. Americans, they find, demand safer neighborhoods or more space than Chinese can afford. Thus many Chinese scholars crowd together, and some of them leave America speaking English little better than they did when they arrived. An administrator at the University of Iowa reports that returnees he has met in China all offer future students the same advice: Don't live with other Chinese.
Their ghettoization in urban neighborhoods give Chinese scholars not just a limited view but a tainted one. Some contend with slumlords and associated vermin. One scholar in New Haven told me, happily, that after he complained about the depletion of his apartment's food supply, his landlord gave him a mousetrap. The first night he used it, it caught seventeen mice.
The lives of scholars are also tainted by American crime. They speak frequently of wallets grabbed, bicycles stolen, friends attacked. A scholar in New Haven lent his apartment's communal bicycle to a neighborhood boy; the boy sold it. A scholar in Chicago, accosted by a young man demanding money, reached into his pocket to offer a few dollars; the man snatched the whole wallet.
Apart from the one major similarity--the difficulty of making friends in a culture that ignores foreigners--a Chinese scholar's social and economic perspective on America can be a near perfect reversal of the lofty vantage point from which most Americans see China. Chinese who are studying here live not in hotels but in ghettos, stay not days but months, encounter not the upbeat but the downcast, garner impressions that are not orchestrated but fragmented. This is a reversal of perspective that the Chinese government seems not to mind. Marvin Baron, of Berkeley, says that officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington told him "they don't want their people to become too indulgent and get more money than they actually need, because then it would become too difficult for them to readjust to life in China when they come back." As a result, while most American visitors to China gather images from an eagle's-eye view, Chinese scholars get what amounts to a worm's-eye view of America.
Although Americans disparage these stipends as minuscule, to Chinese they seem enormous. One month's check for $450 approaches a year's salary at home for most professors. Often the Chinese recipient of such wealth feels obligations like those of an American jackpot winner. He wants his family to benefit also, and the Chinese government accommodates his desire with special arrangements. In one version (details change often) the scholar pays the government $1,500 in American currency. The government waives its import duty (normally 300 to 400 percent) on certain purchases, often referred to as the "eight great items." A lifetime's cache of luxuries then awaits the scholar on his return to China--camera, refrigerator, computer, washer, color television, microwave oven, or whatever. The scholar returns to his family as if he were a winner on Let's Make a Deal.
The scholar's once-in-a-lifetime chance to enrich family and self cuts into his small stipend. To survive, the scholar must live ingeniously. I know one scholar who, horrified by the high cost of American ginger, had a friend smuggle him a year's supply (he brought me a pungent bagful as a present, still moist with the red clay of his province).
Ingenuity, however, goes only so far. It will not buy books or bus fare or admission to cultural events. (The happiest recollections I hear from scholars often include the gift of a theater or intercity bus ticket). Nor will ingenuity allow scholars to escape their isolation. Chinese students who wish to share accommodations with Americans often cannot afford to, even in the crowded and run-down apartments surrounding major universities. Americans, they find, demand safer neighborhoods or more space than Chinese can afford. Thus many Chinese scholars crowd together, and some of them leave America speaking English little better than they did when they arrived. An administrator at the University of Iowa reports that returnees he has met in China all offer future students the same advice: Don't live with other Chinese.
Their ghettoization in urban neighborhoods give Chinese scholars not just a limited view but a tainted one. Some contend with slumlords and associated vermin. One scholar in New Haven told me, happily, that after he complained about the depletion of his apartment's food supply, his landlord gave him a mousetrap. The first night he used it, it caught seventeen mice.
The lives of scholars are also tainted by American crime. They speak frequently of wallets grabbed, bicycles stolen, friends attacked. A scholar in New Haven lent his apartment's communal bicycle to a neighborhood boy; the boy sold it. A scholar in Chicago, accosted by a young man demanding money, reached into his pocket to offer a few dollars; the man snatched the whole wallet.
Apart from the one major similarity--the difficulty of making friends in a culture that ignores foreigners--a Chinese scholar's social and economic perspective on America can be a near perfect reversal of the lofty vantage point from which most Americans see China. Chinese who are studying here live not in hotels but in ghettos, stay not days but months, encounter not the upbeat but the downcast, garner impressions that are not orchestrated but fragmented. This is a reversal of perspective that the Chinese government seems not to mind. Marvin Baron, of Berkeley, says that officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington told him "they don't want their people to become too indulgent and get more money than they actually need, because then it would become too difficult for them to readjust to life in China when they come back." As a result, while most American visitors to China gather images from an eagle's-eye view, Chinese scholars get what amounts to a worm's-eye view of America.
For CHINESE STUDYING IN THE UNITED STATES, as for anyone anywhere, facts of professional, social, and economic life link ultimately to political concerns. These concerns surface frequently in conversation, but for me they were epitomized in the final seminar of a series moderated by Professor R. Randle Edwards at Columbia University's Center for Chinese Legal Studies. There the desire of Chinese scholars to understand how America works and thereby assess how China should or should not proceed politically became the dominant force.
For weeks Edwards and some American colleagues, along with five Chinese legal scholars, had discussed issues such as freedom of speech in China, China's growing private economy, and the applicability of Chinese law in capitalist Hong Kong--issues of shared concern, no doubt, but ones that interested the Americans primarily. For this final session the Chinese scholars had set their own agenda. They wished to talk only about how the American political system--the courts, the legal process, the selection of legislators, the making of foreign policy--was democratized, made "open to individuals."
For an hour the Chinese asked questions furiously. Edwards broke into a sweat as he dashed from seminar table to blackboard, scrawling "sunshine laws" and "urban affairs" and "conference committees." He cited Ralph Nader to explain interest groups and Pierre du Pont to explain the significance of campaign spending limits. No, he said, immigration law is not secret, and yes, Supreme Court decisions are public.
At the end of the seminar Edwards announced that he would like to celebrate with a banquet, a Chinese custom. One visitor countered that more talk was all they wanted. He said, "It's okay if we just eat bread."
When scholars discuss the political freedom they have encountered during their months or years in America, they speak most often about open exchange of information and ideas. Chinese students here freely create professional associations--the Chinese Young Economists, the Chinese Business Association, the Association of Life Sciences for Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States--some of which foster informal political discussion as readily as they sponsor technical seminars. They publish journals of opinion. They sign open letters questioning Chinese government policies. They spend many hours in library periodical rooms. They maintain a nationwide computer bulletin board, full of political debate, on the American interuniversity network called BITNET.
Easy access to information may be the single most radicalizing influence. A young graduate of Fudan University, Zhao Xinshu, recently conducted a survey of 112 Chinese students at the University of Wisconsin, where he is now a doctoral candidate in social and psychological research. He wished to discover what factors incline visiting students toward dissidence.
Zhao discovered that some presumed radicalizers--including many years of living in the United States or many hours of reading dissident publications--in fact have little effect. He found only two factors that seem to correlate with student opposition to official Chinese government ideology: youthfulness, and many hours spent reading the New York Times. The Times has influence, Zhao speculates, because students believe what it prints. Students who spend more than five hours a week with the Times prove particularly dissident.
For weeks Edwards and some American colleagues, along with five Chinese legal scholars, had discussed issues such as freedom of speech in China, China's growing private economy, and the applicability of Chinese law in capitalist Hong Kong--issues of shared concern, no doubt, but ones that interested the Americans primarily. For this final session the Chinese scholars had set their own agenda. They wished to talk only about how the American political system--the courts, the legal process, the selection of legislators, the making of foreign policy--was democratized, made "open to individuals."
For an hour the Chinese asked questions furiously. Edwards broke into a sweat as he dashed from seminar table to blackboard, scrawling "sunshine laws" and "urban affairs" and "conference committees." He cited Ralph Nader to explain interest groups and Pierre du Pont to explain the significance of campaign spending limits. No, he said, immigration law is not secret, and yes, Supreme Court decisions are public.
At the end of the seminar Edwards announced that he would like to celebrate with a banquet, a Chinese custom. One visitor countered that more talk was all they wanted. He said, "It's okay if we just eat bread."
When scholars discuss the political freedom they have encountered during their months or years in America, they speak most often about open exchange of information and ideas. Chinese students here freely create professional associations--the Chinese Young Economists, the Chinese Business Association, the Association of Life Sciences for Chinese Students and Scholars in the United States--some of which foster informal political discussion as readily as they sponsor technical seminars. They publish journals of opinion. They sign open letters questioning Chinese government policies. They spend many hours in library periodical rooms. They maintain a nationwide computer bulletin board, full of political debate, on the American interuniversity network called BITNET.
Easy access to information may be the single most radicalizing influence. A young graduate of Fudan University, Zhao Xinshu, recently conducted a survey of 112 Chinese students at the University of Wisconsin, where he is now a doctoral candidate in social and psychological research. He wished to discover what factors incline visiting students toward dissidence.
Zhao discovered that some presumed radicalizers--including many years of living in the United States or many hours of reading dissident publications--in fact have little effect. He found only two factors that seem to correlate with student opposition to official Chinese government ideology: youthfulness, and many hours spent reading the New York Times. The Times has influence, Zhao speculates, because students believe what it prints. Students who spend more than five hours a week with the Times prove particularly dissident.
Fears of a Chinese Brain Drain
CHINESE SCHOLARS IMMERSED IN THESE SEVERAL ASPECTS of American life--professional, social, economic, and political--often show signs of resistance to returning home. Some students and scholars say they are attracted to American ways. One will speak of testing his skills in a society that values competition; another, more concretely, will compare his summer job as a New York lawyer at $1,300 a week with his permanent job as a Beijing lawyer at $10 a week. Some express criticism of Chinese political policy. One will endorse a letter challenging government directives; another will complain that China could never adopt a Freedom of Information Act. These and other signs suggest to some China-watchers that large numbers of Chinese students and scholars will not return home. Might China's ambitious experiment end in an enormous brain drain?
No one worries about this more than the Chinese government. Its State Education Commission, which reported that by 1987 slightly more than a quarter of the students and scholars it had sent to the United States had returned, has asked Americans to help enforce the new strict limits on duration of study abroad. It pressed the United States Information Agency, for example, to help ensure that Chinese students return to their homeland.
With questions of brain drain and non-return in mind, I sought out Hu Ping, a Chinese student who has become a symbol of political dissidence and an applicant for political asylum. Early in 1987 Hu enrolled as a doctoral candidate in political theory at Harvard, where he began a book on Chinese democracy. A year later he left Harvard to assume the editorship of the Chinese-language newspaper China Spring--itself a symbol of dissidence, and, according to a 1987 judgment by a Shanghai court, a "counterrevolutionary" publication. In the PRC one of China Spring's American-educated staff members had been sentenced to a two-year prison term when, during a visit home, he wrote posters encouraging student protest. Early last year, after Hu moved to China Spring, the Chinese government invalidated his passport. Students began to joke that the government had helped Hu in his application for American political asylum--which no Chinese student had yet received, but which the United States grants to "refugees" who demonstrate a "well-founded fear of persecution" if they return home. (Last August the United States made its first three grants of asylum to Chinese students or scholars-to three couples who had had second children in America and thus might, in the judgment of Edwin Meese, then the Attorney General, be subject to persecution for violating China's one-child limit.)
I found Hu in the railroad-car apartment in Queens, near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, that serves as the office for China Spring. Hu talked about his intellectual development as a student, reading Plato, Locke, and Hume at Beijing University. We discussed his essay "On Freedom of Speech"--notorious in China--which artfully quotes Milton, Hegel, and Mao, among others, to argue that the Chinese people deserve the freedom to "think, say, and write whatever they wish."
In answer to the charge that China Spring is counter-revolutionary, Hu insisted that it seeks not to oppose but to "correct" the Chinese Constitution. "We don't agree with the four basic principles," he continued, striking a moderate tone but making a radical argument. Those principles are the key Marxist elements of the Constitution's preamble: socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership role of the Chinese Communist Party, and Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought. "We feel," he said, "that you have no right to force every citizen to be beneath Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought--not in a government constitution. You can write it in a party constitution."
As Hu spoke, his colleagues hauled down the corridor mailbags containing the latest issue of China Spring, which happened to carry the letter from students imploring the Chinese government not to limit their stays in the United States. I asked Hu if he thought most students and scholars would return to China. He believed that most would, he said, though in the "short term" he personally might find return difficult. "Some [American] professor said to me, 'You are one of the most wanting-to-return-to-China-people.' " That's true, Hu told me: "Our cause is in China, not here."
Hu's words typify what I hear from Chinese students and scholars. Cong Dachang, an anthropologist at Yale whose family was one of the three that received political asylum last summer, told me that he finds it "hard to imagine growing old" in America. Liu Binyan, a controversial journalist whom China recently expelled from its Communist Party but who has been allowed to spend 1988-1989 as a Nieman fellow at Harvard, reportedly shrugs off questions about whether he will return. He says he would be useless anywhere but China.
No one worries about this more than the Chinese government. Its State Education Commission, which reported that by 1987 slightly more than a quarter of the students and scholars it had sent to the United States had returned, has asked Americans to help enforce the new strict limits on duration of study abroad. It pressed the United States Information Agency, for example, to help ensure that Chinese students return to their homeland.
With questions of brain drain and non-return in mind, I sought out Hu Ping, a Chinese student who has become a symbol of political dissidence and an applicant for political asylum. Early in 1987 Hu enrolled as a doctoral candidate in political theory at Harvard, where he began a book on Chinese democracy. A year later he left Harvard to assume the editorship of the Chinese-language newspaper China Spring--itself a symbol of dissidence, and, according to a 1987 judgment by a Shanghai court, a "counterrevolutionary" publication. In the PRC one of China Spring's American-educated staff members had been sentenced to a two-year prison term when, during a visit home, he wrote posters encouraging student protest. Early last year, after Hu moved to China Spring, the Chinese government invalidated his passport. Students began to joke that the government had helped Hu in his application for American political asylum--which no Chinese student had yet received, but which the United States grants to "refugees" who demonstrate a "well-founded fear of persecution" if they return home. (Last August the United States made its first three grants of asylum to Chinese students or scholars-to three couples who had had second children in America and thus might, in the judgment of Edwin Meese, then the Attorney General, be subject to persecution for violating China's one-child limit.)
I found Hu in the railroad-car apartment in Queens, near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, that serves as the office for China Spring. Hu talked about his intellectual development as a student, reading Plato, Locke, and Hume at Beijing University. We discussed his essay "On Freedom of Speech"--notorious in China--which artfully quotes Milton, Hegel, and Mao, among others, to argue that the Chinese people deserve the freedom to "think, say, and write whatever they wish."
In answer to the charge that China Spring is counter-revolutionary, Hu insisted that it seeks not to oppose but to "correct" the Chinese Constitution. "We don't agree with the four basic principles," he continued, striking a moderate tone but making a radical argument. Those principles are the key Marxist elements of the Constitution's preamble: socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership role of the Chinese Communist Party, and Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought. "We feel," he said, "that you have no right to force every citizen to be beneath Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought--not in a government constitution. You can write it in a party constitution."
As Hu spoke, his colleagues hauled down the corridor mailbags containing the latest issue of China Spring, which happened to carry the letter from students imploring the Chinese government not to limit their stays in the United States. I asked Hu if he thought most students and scholars would return to China. He believed that most would, he said, though in the "short term" he personally might find return difficult. "Some [American] professor said to me, 'You are one of the most wanting-to-return-to-China-people.' " That's true, Hu told me: "Our cause is in China, not here."
Hu's words typify what I hear from Chinese students and scholars. Cong Dachang, an anthropologist at Yale whose family was one of the three that received political asylum last summer, told me that he finds it "hard to imagine growing old" in America. Liu Binyan, a controversial journalist whom China recently expelled from its Communist Party but who has been allowed to spend 1988-1989 as a Nieman fellow at Harvard, reportedly shrugs off questions about whether he will return. He says he would be useless anywhere but China.
MANY KNOWLEDGEABLE AMERICANS consider fears of a Chinese brain drain to be overblown. "Initially," says Marvin Baron, of Berkeley, "I expected a percentage to stay that would be nearly comparable to that from Taiwan"--a country that in most years during the past decade has had even more people studying in the United States than China has had, and that has suffered a non-return rate often estimated to be higher than 60 percent. "I very quickly realized," Baron says, "that that wouldn't be the case. The truth is, I still know of relatively few Chinese, five percent or so, who have tried to stay."
That most Chinese have been returning is confirmed in figures recently compiled by Leo A. Orleans, the author of Chinese Students in America. U.S. visa data for 1979 to 1987 show that 34,000 Chinese students and scholars came here with J-1 visas--the visa category that roughly corresponds to what the Chinese government calls officially sponsored students. Of those students 12,500 have already returned to China. Another 21,000, most of whom have arrived too recently to finish degree programs, remain enrolled in American universities. Only 500 have changed their visa status--typically by marrying an American or getting an American employer to list them as essential personnel--to remain in the United States.
A different pattern is suggested by the statistics that Orleans compiled on students who came with F-1 visas--primarily "self-sponsored" students whose return China encourages but cannot control. Orleans estimates that 7,000 of these students have returned, 7,000 remain enrolled, and 8,000 have changed their visa status. This ratio represents a brain drain comparable to that suffered by other developing nations. For China it seems to represent a modest embarrassment but no great loss.
For those students abroad who do return, China has great expectations. "When you have finished your study and come home," it reassured scholars and students here a few years ago, "you should be a fresh crack force for China's cause of socialist modernization and pillars of the state by the first year of the 21st century."
But these pillars, some Chinese suggest, may not support the existing state--at least not without continued political reform. And as history shows, returning students have in the past shaken the Chinese state. Both the overthrow of China's last emperor and the arrival of Marxism in China drew strength from students educated overseas.
The ultimate impact of today's students and scholars remains open to question. Some analysts, including Glenn Shive, of the Institute of International Education, argue that an entire generation of leaders, many of them Soviettrained, must retire before these American-trained students can come to power. "But eventually," Shive says, "they will get together, and they will move like a generation through the universities, legal system, and government." As they do, Shive predicts, "they are going to offend their colleagues. But they're going to persist, and eventually prevail. I think they're going to inherit the earth over there."
But just as history shows that foreign-trained students have helped transform China, it also shows that predictions about their effect have been exaggerated. In 1921, for example, The Daily Mail of London prophesied that the number of Chinese studying in America would lead to undue American--non-British, that is--influence on China's future. "Educated under the American system, constantly reminded of the happy associations of their school days through the influential alumni organization, aware that they owe their scholarships to American justice, and saturated with American sentiment by five to eight years' residence in the country," the Mail wrote, those students from Beijing would "look to the United States solely for cooperation in the troublous years to come." Not so, as it happened.
And not likely today. Chinese students and scholars seem as unsaturated with American sentiment as they seem unsatisfied in what could be called their lovers' quarrel with China. Whatever they eventually inherit in China--perhaps the earth, perhaps only the wind--the legacy of their American years will not be what the Chinese government derides as "wholesale Westernization." It will be selective, cautious--in effect, retail Westernization.
Chinese students and scholars in America today speak in ways that recall Yen Fu, one of the first Chinese students sent to Britain, in 1876. Yen admired the West for its liberty and wealth and democracy. But ultimately he found the West inadequate, for he felt that it had made little progress toward the "three criteria of an ideal society--material sufficiency enjoyed by all, moral excellence attained by many, and crimes committed by none." Indeed, he suggested, "the West is heading toward the opposite direction."
That most Chinese have been returning is confirmed in figures recently compiled by Leo A. Orleans, the author of Chinese Students in America. U.S. visa data for 1979 to 1987 show that 34,000 Chinese students and scholars came here with J-1 visas--the visa category that roughly corresponds to what the Chinese government calls officially sponsored students. Of those students 12,500 have already returned to China. Another 21,000, most of whom have arrived too recently to finish degree programs, remain enrolled in American universities. Only 500 have changed their visa status--typically by marrying an American or getting an American employer to list them as essential personnel--to remain in the United States.
A different pattern is suggested by the statistics that Orleans compiled on students who came with F-1 visas--primarily "self-sponsored" students whose return China encourages but cannot control. Orleans estimates that 7,000 of these students have returned, 7,000 remain enrolled, and 8,000 have changed their visa status. This ratio represents a brain drain comparable to that suffered by other developing nations. For China it seems to represent a modest embarrassment but no great loss.
For those students abroad who do return, China has great expectations. "When you have finished your study and come home," it reassured scholars and students here a few years ago, "you should be a fresh crack force for China's cause of socialist modernization and pillars of the state by the first year of the 21st century."
But these pillars, some Chinese suggest, may not support the existing state--at least not without continued political reform. And as history shows, returning students have in the past shaken the Chinese state. Both the overthrow of China's last emperor and the arrival of Marxism in China drew strength from students educated overseas.
The ultimate impact of today's students and scholars remains open to question. Some analysts, including Glenn Shive, of the Institute of International Education, argue that an entire generation of leaders, many of them Soviettrained, must retire before these American-trained students can come to power. "But eventually," Shive says, "they will get together, and they will move like a generation through the universities, legal system, and government." As they do, Shive predicts, "they are going to offend their colleagues. But they're going to persist, and eventually prevail. I think they're going to inherit the earth over there."
But just as history shows that foreign-trained students have helped transform China, it also shows that predictions about their effect have been exaggerated. In 1921, for example, The Daily Mail of London prophesied that the number of Chinese studying in America would lead to undue American--non-British, that is--influence on China's future. "Educated under the American system, constantly reminded of the happy associations of their school days through the influential alumni organization, aware that they owe their scholarships to American justice, and saturated with American sentiment by five to eight years' residence in the country," the Mail wrote, those students from Beijing would "look to the United States solely for cooperation in the troublous years to come." Not so, as it happened.
And not likely today. Chinese students and scholars seem as unsaturated with American sentiment as they seem unsatisfied in what could be called their lovers' quarrel with China. Whatever they eventually inherit in China--perhaps the earth, perhaps only the wind--the legacy of their American years will not be what the Chinese government derides as "wholesale Westernization." It will be selective, cautious--in effect, retail Westernization.
Chinese students and scholars in America today speak in ways that recall Yen Fu, one of the first Chinese students sent to Britain, in 1876. Yen admired the West for its liberty and wealth and democracy. But ultimately he found the West inadequate, for he felt that it had made little progress toward the "three criteria of an ideal society--material sufficiency enjoyed by all, moral excellence attained by many, and crimes committed by none." Indeed, he suggested, "the West is heading toward the opposite direction."