September 05, 2024

How to Revamp Chinese Students’ American Education

By: Bill Drexel and Grace Gao

Matriculation season has arrived, and it may mark the 15th consecutive academic year that Chinese students make up the largest share of America’s foreign university students. While surveys won’t immediately provide confirmation of total numbers, one thing is certain: China will remain a vital source of university students for years to come. There appears no end in sight for policymakers and educators concerned about how to approach the influx of students arriving from the United States’s chief adversary.

The topic is fraught for good reason: Chinese students in America present a historic opportunity for the United States, but American universities are still failing to educate Chinese students in a manner consistent with American values and interests—and hemorrhaging indispensable skills to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the process.

The PRC today operates the largest and most sophisticated propaganda apparatus in human history.

America’s universities can do better. After years of facing polarizing public debates and government investigations into Chinese ties to American higher education, a defensive approach to educating Chinese students is understandable. But colleges should instead be proactive in promoting to them the value of liberal society and free inquiry through education. To do so, they should empower the United States’s sizable pro-democracy Chinese diaspora to offer freely available online courses on the topic that has been most aggressively censored in the People’s Republic of China (PRC): China’s own modern history, including Chinese democracy movements. By incentivizing, but not requiring, such courses for admissions or academic credit, American universities could help undermine the anti-liberal attitudes that Beijing has worked to instill in China’s future elites studying abroad.

Read the full article from Lawfare.

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