On the show this week, Jeremiah and David dialogue about one of their long-term common missions: educating American study abroad students about the complex culture and politics of China. With the rise of the PRC as an economic power, it has always been vitally important to get American scholars to this country to gain first-hand experience with the language and culture. Yet, It has always been a challenge to establish and maintain study abroad programs in China. For decades there had always been a significant disparity between the number of Chinese students in the US vs. American students in China, but now with rising US-China tensions and the onslaught of Covid-19, the China study abroad student has become somewhat of an endangered species. The pre-Covid number of Chinese students in the US studying for undergraduate and graduate degrees had increased to about 370,000 by 2019. By contrast, the number of American students studying in China, after a brief spike prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, had declined to a mere 11,000 in the 2017-18 school year. Jeremiah and David reminisce about their experience teaching US students in Beijing, discuss the geopolitical importance of fostering a China-savvy cohort of American scholars entering the US workforce, and explore possible strategies and models for building China study programs in the post-Covid world.
David Moser, A Fearful Asymmetry: Covid-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China