President Xi Jinping has pledged to bring 50,000 young Americans to China over the next five years for study and exchange programmes as a way to improve ties. Observers say reaching that goal will not be easy – but visa-free entry could help.
They say a tense geopolitical climate, uncertainty over the US election and negative public opinion could all stand in the way, in addition to Washington’s warning against travelling to China.
The convoluted process of getting a visa is also a deterrent, and observers have urged Beijing to reduce red tape and offer visa-free entry for US students if it wants to meet its target.
Xi announced the plan when he was in California in November after a meeting with US President Joe Biden where the two leaders agreed to try to stabilise relations, including through more non-official exchanges.
China has hosted a slew of exchange events since then, including last month’s “Bond with Kuliang: 2024 China-US Youth Festival”.
Beijing pitched it as the biggest youth exchange event between the two nations since they established diplomatic relations more than 40 years ago, and more than 200 young Americans took part in the weeklong festival in the southeastern province of Fujian.
A message from Xi was relayed at the event, with the Chinese leader saying that “the future of China-US relations lies in the young people” and calling on the next generation of both countries to work together for “the sound and steady growth” of bilateral ties.
At least 60 exchange events have been held across China as part of the plan nearly eight months after Xi made the announcement, according to a report by the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think tank in Beijing.
“There is still a long way to go,” Miao Lu, secretary general of the CCG, said at an event to release the report on July 5. “The numbers need to be higher.”
Most exchange and study programmes in China are run by government-affiliated foreign affairs groups, and most are short term, according to the CCG report.
And while just a few thousand US students are currently enrolled in long-term courses in China, a “disproportionate” 300,000 Chinese are doing the same thing at American universities and colleges.
Nearly 3,000 American students are estimated to be studying in China at present, CCG founder and president Wang Huiyao said at the Beijing event. That is far lower than the number a decade ago, when more than 24,000 US students were in China, according to education ministry figures.
The CCG report said tighter visa policies in both China and the US had made it harder for Chinese organisations to host American delegations.
It called on Beijing to allow “qualified” young Americans to visit China without a visa, as it has already done for the citizens of some 20 countries.
“That would then be the biggest advantage we have,” Wang said.
It would also send a signal to the US, according to Miao. She said Beijing could consider setting criteria for visa exemptions such as specifying an age range and the types of programmes students might take part in.
That view was echoed by Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Wu told a security forum in Beijing this month that China should be “more open and flexible” on visas in light of the invitation to American students.
“Why not [provide] free visas to the [American] young people, and encourage them to come to China to seek truth from fact?” he said during a panel discussion at the World Peace Forum on July 7. “If we can take a unilateral step in that direction, I think that will help a lot.”
There have also been calls to simplify the visa process from observers in the United States.
Kenneth Hammond, a professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University, said it was a “very complicated” and “very challenging” process for an American to get a China visa.
He said it seemed to be a case of having to “prove that you deserve to go to China rather than we really want you to come to China”.
“For young people who maybe want to go, the visa process, it’s got to be simplified,” Hammond said. “It’s got to be streamlined to make it more … user friendly.”
China has since last year offered visa-free entry for up to 15 days to more than a dozen countries – most of them in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. New Zealand, Australia and Poland are the latest to be added to the visa-free list.
The visa-waiver programme is widely seen as a move to bring more foreign investors and visitors to China, to boost growth in the world’s No 2 economy and repair its image after years of strict zero-Covid controls and efforts to clamp down on alleged espionage.
After attending a reception in Shanghai last month for a six-week summer school – a collaboration between Fudan University and Harvard University – US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns posted on X that: “Academic exchanges are essential for the next generation of US and Chinese leaders to know and understand one another.”
That was two days after The Wall Street Journal published an interview in which Burns accused Beijing of making people-to-people exchanges “impossible”. Beijing later rejected his claim and alleged mistreatment of Chinese students in the US.
These accusations again lay bare the deep mistrust between the two sides, which experts see as one of the challenges in Beijing’s plan to entice more American students to China.
Duncan Wall, a 20-year-old philosophy student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, said the “contentious” relationship between the two countries was one of the reasons he was put off going to China on an exchange or study programme.
“It would not be good if I was caught in China if there were to be a war or even just a tense diplomatic stand-off,” he said, though he added that he was “not naturally an adventurous person who likes to travel far and wide”.
There is also much uncertainty over the US presidential election in November. In its report, the CCG said candidates from both parties would be likely to take a harder line on China during their campaigns, and that the call from Republican hawks to “defeat” China could lead to more visa restrictions and the scaling back or even cancellation of youth exchange programmes.
“The negative public opinion atmosphere between China and the US has also made some [Chinese] organisations more cautious about carrying out exchange activities with the US or hosting American civil society exchange groups, and even avoid participating in exchanges that may cause controversy,” the report said.
The same unease has also been seen in the United States. Denis Simon, a veteran of US-China educational cooperation, said it was difficult for American public universities to move away from “anti-China” rhetoric.
“They are facing state legislatures who control their budgets. They are also facing fears that they will lose public support from the federal government for research if they seem to be too friendly or overly friendly with China,” he said at the CCG event in Beijing.
Simon said a “big inhibitor” to rekindling educational ties was the US State Department’s travel advisory for China.
In the latest update in April, the US kept the risk at level three of four in an advisory that urges visitors to “reconsider travel” to China. It cites an arbitrary enforcement of local laws, “including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions”.
Simon said it was “ludicrous” to fear that students going to China would be caught up in such a scenario.
“In my 40-plus years of working on this problem, I do not know of any case in which an American student was prevented from leaving China for some kind of political reason,” said Simon, the former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in eastern China.
The joint venture between Duke University and Wuhan University will bring a delegation of 75 students from US universities to Jiangsu province in August.
Wang from CCG called for the travel advisory to be downgraded, saying it would “remove a big hurdle for people to come” to China.
Another issue is that while several Chinese agencies have emerged to coordinate the initiative to bring American students to China, “unfortunately, the US has not designated any counterpart organisation”, according to Simon.
“This is the same mistake that was made back under the [Barack] Obama administration when there was a ‘100,000 Strong’ initiative and that also lacked a coordinating organisation to bring it into fruition,” he said, referring to a 2010 plan to boost the number of US students in China.
Hammond from NMSU also pointed to pressure from the government on American public universities to cut back on exchanges with their Chinese peers and said there was a lack of funding for programme costs.
He also noted the influence on young people of American media and political discourse that presented China in a “very negative” light.
US student Em Gunter is about to start her fourth year in medical anthropology at the University of Virginia, with a minor in Chinese language and culture. She decided against doing her research in China, partly because she thought it was “not a good idea” to spend months in a country that “doesn’t actually have a free press and suppresses political dissidents”.
In December, the US House select committee on China urged the University of Montana to cancel a study trip by its Max S. Baucus Institute this summer, citing concerns over Beijing’s “malign influence campaigns”.
The public university rejected the call and the 11-day trip to Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai went ahead.
Institute founder Max Baucus, a former US ambassador to Beijing, said some American policymakers might have been “misguided” about China. He also called for the Fulbright exchange programme – ended by Trump four years ago – to be resumed.
Baucus said the current status of bilateral people-to-people exchanges was “deeply disappointing” because too few Americans were visiting China. “Americans need to know more about China,” he said. “That can only be learned with actual visits.”
He said he was “encouraged” by the initiative to bring more US students to China but Beijing needed to put more work into it. “Otherwise, I’m concerned it will be a missed opportunity. It’ll be words not action,” he said.
Last month’s youth festival in Fujian was one of the more high-profile events so far, but it was criticised for being too choreographed and lacking meaningful discussion.
Asked how it could have been done better, retired senior US diplomat Susan Thornton said the most important thing was to “let them have fun”.
“Don’t control their movements so closely that they can’t really see,” said Thornton, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre who was also attending the security forum in Beijing.
“There are a lot of fun things to do in China. It’s not feeling as fun as it used to,” she said. “I think that’s too bad and I think we should all loosen up a little bit, be more confident.”
Additional reporting by Coy Li, Yijing Shen and Kamun Lai
