The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was the first university in the world to insure the number of Chinese students.
In 2017, out of fear of a possible decline in Chinese students, UIUC Business School and School of Engineering bought a 3-year insurance policy that could claim up to $61 million in the event that the reduction in Chinese students led to a significant decline in school revenue.
UIUC relies heavily on Chinese students, and one-fifth of its business school is funded by tuition fees paid by Chinese students.
Many have questioned this as "alarmist" – UIUC is one of the most popular American universities for Chinese students, attracting more than 5,900 Chinese students in 2017, and that number has been growing.
But university leaders worry that as the outlook for U.S.-China relations becomes uncertain, even world-renowned schools like UIUC (which was ranked 36th in the Times World University Rankings that year) will become less attractive to Chinese students.
Buying insurance proved to be prescient — and what school leaders feared became a reality.
In 2021, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States plummeted by 14.6%, after 20 consecutive years of growth. This is largely due to travel restrictions due to the pandemic. But before the epidemic, the market for studying in the United States was already sluggish. Since 2017, the growth rate of Chinese students studying in the United States has declined significantly, and the growth has stagnated, maintaining a scale of about 360,000.
The number of international students is growing rapidly and is even becoming more volume. In 2019, before the outbreak, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States increased by only 0.8%, far lower than the average growth rate of more than 17% between 2006 and 2016, and lower than the total growth rate of 6.5% of Chinese international students that year.
The era of studying in the United States seems to be coming to an end. According to a survey by a well-known educational institution in China, from 2015 to 2022, the proportion of people who prefer the United States in study destinations dropped from 51% to 30%; The number of people choosing the UK has increased significantly, from 32% to 41%, and the attractiveness of Singapore and Hong Kong has also increased significantly.
This is both related to the diversity of study destinations and the catalyst of the epidemic. Beyond that, however, there are more important reasons.
International students and their parents line up for check-in in Pudong Airport Terminal 2 on August 19, 2021, Shanghai. (@视觉中国 Figures)
"Sacrifice"
The number of Chinese students mentioned at the beginning of UIUC has also continued to decline since 2018, "just in this year" Trump announced a trade war against China.
After taking office as US president in 2017, Trump implemented a series of highly controversial xenophobic measures. In addition to banning citizens of seven countries, including Muslim-majority Iraq, building a wall along the U.S. border to stop immigration, and withdrawing from Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, he has not spared China, which is seen as its biggest rival.
Trump has been "stigmatizing" China. He claimed that "China is stealing American jobs" and "stealing American intellectual property" and has launched a trade war against China. After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Trump blamed China for the epidemic problem.
Many of Trump's xenophobic measures have had little or no effect, but their attitude toward China has catalyzed the hatred of Chinese and even Asians in some American society.
The Pew Research Center survey found that from 2018 to 2021, the proportion of Americans with a negative view of China rose from 46% to 67%, and nearly 90% of Americans saw China as their biggest competitor.
Hate crimes against Asians have also begun to surge. According to FBI statistics, related cases soared from 161 in 2018 to 746 in 2021. At the same time, the "stubborn disease" of American society - mass shootings - has also increased. From 2018 to 2022, related cases almost doubled, from 336 to 647. In 2021, about 50 people died every day from gun violence in the United States.
On June 24, 2019, in Peoria, USA, Zhang Yingying's father read a statement in a Chinese outside the courtroom, and her mother was saddened, and Zhang Yingying was tragically killed after visiting the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. (@视觉中国 Figures)
When this information comes up frequently, it seems that the United States is becoming increasingly insecure to many Chinese, including international students. Moreover, in reality, the international student community is indeed affected by this wave of xenophobia.
In 2020, Trump issued a presidential order prohibiting Chinese researchers linked to military companies from studying at U.S. universities on suspicion that they might "steal" U.S. military technology and engage in "espionage" activities.
Within three months of the ban taking effect, the United States revoked the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students, and many more were denied visas.
After Biden took over as president, he continued some of Trump's confrontational policies, and this visa restriction for Chinese researchers was also retained.
The U.S. government argues that the ban only targets one percent of Chinese student visa applicants. But it is undoubtedly an open practice of putting suspicion of Chinese students on the surface.
In 2021, the famous "hawkish" Republican Senator Tom Cotton proposed legislation to completely ban Chinese students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) from obtaining US visas, although the bill did not receive enough support to pass, but made the prospects of Chinese students in the United States more uncertain.
There are many more attempts to expel Chinese students. In 2021, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Dove Zackheim said in the Capitol Hill that "Chinese students have long been considered a potential threat to U.S. intellectual property," and he advocated increasing national scholarships to replace 370,000 Chinese students with U.S. students, so that the income of American universities would not decrease.
In the face of increasing suspicion, hostility and even violence in the United States from the government to the people, many Chinese students worry that they are becoming "victims" of the deterioration of Sino-US relations, victims of "witch hunts", and the United States is no longer the first choice for studying abroad.
From "100,000 Dispatches" to "China Action Plan"
When Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, he was woken up by a phone call at 3 a.m. At that time, his heart sank, thinking, oh my God, there must be "a disaster somewhere" in the United States. Picking up the phone, the voice of Frank Price, the national science adviser, came from the other side.
The call was made at Deng Xiaoping's insistence. It was 1978, Price was visiting China, and Deng Xiaoping wanted to convey through him the idea of "sending 5,000 students to the United States." To this, Carter responded, "Let him send 100,000," and then hung up the phone groggily.
From 1872 to 1875, the Qing government sent 120 young children to study in the United States, and they were the first batch of official students in Chinese history, including Zhan Tianyou, who was later known as the "father of China's railways", and Tang Shaoyi, the first premier of the Republic of China. (@视觉中国 Figures)
On January 1, 1979, China and the United States formally established diplomatic relations, and just five days earlier, 52 Chinese students boarded a flight to the United States. Among these 52 people, there were 6 people, including Li Yanda and Chen Junliang, who later became academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The biggest wave of studying in the United States to date has also begun.
From the beginning, international students have been a symbol of the changing relationship between China and the United States. Similarly, they are affected when there are twists and turns in Sino-US relations.
"Once Sino-US relations deteriorate, such criminal charges as 'China threat' or 'Chinese students and scholars are spies' will emerge." You Tianlong, a scholar of international migration and associate professor of sociology at Yunnan University, mentioned in a podcast that in 1999, the "Lee Wen Ho case" in the United States that shook the Chinese world occurred. At that time, Chinese scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of leaking nuclear weapons secrets to China and was innocently detained for nine months. "At that time, the United States had begun to see China as a strategic competitor. In the 2000 US election, George W. Bush played the China card in the election, groundlessly accusing China, believing that China was an enemy of the United States. ”
However, after the outbreak of 9/11, the United States needed China's support in dealing with global counterterrorism issues. Relations between the two sides improved again. Coupled with the increase in the number of private students in China, the United States has also relaxed restrictions on student visas after the anti-terrorism situation has gradually stabilized, and the number of Chinese students studying in the United States has begun to skyrocket. By 2019, more than 370,000 Chinese students were studying at U.S. universities, accounting for 35% of the U.S. international student population and contributing $15.9 billion in U.S. revenue.
More than 40 years of studying in the United States has built a bridge for exchanges between China and the United States, but now, the foundation of this bridge is becoming more and more unstable.
You Tianlong analysis believes that in fact, this trend began during the Obama administration. "By the end of the Obama administration, especially the four years of the Trump administration, litigation became a routine operation to crack down on Chinese students and scholars." "For example, the most famous 'China Initiative,' You said. Under this plan, prosecutors in almost all the United States were mobilized to coordinate at the federal level, take action at the level of various prosecutors, and prosecutors also launched various lawsuits against Chinese students and scholars. In fact, many lawsuits are untenable, but this deterrent effect of everyone endangering themselves has already taken place. ”
According to Xinhua News Agency, although by early 2022, the US Department of Justice terminated the implementation of the "China Action Plan" for more than three years, the "chilling effect" brought by it has erected an invisible curtain wall for normal scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation between China and the United States.
On the other hand, Chinese's favorability of the United States is also declining. The Global Times quoted a foreign survey in 2023 as saying that 77% of Chinese people lack a favorable opinion of the United States.
"My generation of Chinese look to the United States," said Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Chinese Minmin University, in an op-ed for The New York Times, "but after years of observing America's overseas wars, reckless economic policies, and destructive partisanship — culminating in last year's (2021) shameful attack on the U.S. Capitol — many Chinese, myself included, can barely recognize the shining beacon anymore." ”
Chinese students are turning their attention to places such as the United Kingdom and Singapore, which also have world-renowned universities, but the study environment is safer, the cost is lower, and it is easier to obtain local employment opportunities after graduation. In 2023, the UK had 17 universities in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings, second only to 27 in the US, and the number of Chinese studying in the UK increased by 50% from 2017 to 2022.
However, the United States is also relying on students from India, Vietnam and other places to fill the void left by China. In 2022, the number of Indian students studying in the United States grew by 19%, totaling nearly 200,000 people – comparable to the growth rate of China's study in the United States between 2006 and 2013.
"Maybe in the short term we can get compensation through insurance," said the head of UIUC Business School when referring to the trend of fewer Chinese students, "but in the long run, we must diversify the source of international students." ”