Читать книгу The Transpacific Experiment - Matt Sheehan - Страница 10

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FRESHMAN ORIENTATION

Tim Lin has crystal-clear memories of the first time he woke up in an American dorm room. Tim was at Miami University in Ohio, nearly 7,000 miles east of his hometown in northwest China, and he was eager to get a jump on student life halfway around the world. But waking up early that morning, he got a different kind of education. Slumped across the bed of his roommate was a woman, fast asleep and completely naked.

“I was seventeen years old. I had never seen a real naked girl. I’d seen something like that, but on the computer or on the TV,” Tim recounted to me.

He remembered thinking to himself, “Oh, so this is what it really is. . . .” From there, Tim was quickly inducted into the rites and rituals of collegiate America: Saturday football games, campus controversies, and tequila shots.

Fast-forward three years from Tim’s 2012 graduation, and I’m watching blood rush to his head as he hangs upside down from a spine-stretching device at his start-up’s headquarters in Beijing. A couple of his employees look over with a mix of curiosity and concern as Tim’s face turns a deep red. But he is at ease, calmly explaining to me the origins of his start-up: College Daily.

After graduating from Miami University in 2012, Tim spent a couple years bouncing between continents: working in Silicon Valley, volunteering in East Africa, and eventually landing back in China. That’s when Tim created College Daily, a media company devoted entirely to the needs of Chinese students on foreign campuses. He began by writing articles explaining the things about American collegiate life that he wished he’d known during his undergrad years: What does it mean to get “sexiled” by your roommate? How can Chinese students enter the H-1B lottery for American work visas? And what is this “Super Bowl” that everyone is talking about?

Tim began by posting the articles in a Chinese smartphone app called WeChat, and they quickly connected with a rapidly growing population of Chinese students in the United States. In the decade between when Tim enrolled at Miami University in 2008 and 2018, the number of Chinese students at American colleges had more than tripled from 98,000 to just over 360,000.¹ California led all other states with over 60,000 Chinese students, nearly 50 percent more than second-place New York.² Along with College Daily’s audience abroad, the start-up also targets the millions of parents in China who have international ambitions for their child’s education. That reach earned Tim venture-capital funding, which he used to rent an office in a chic Beijing complex and hire a team of writers and editors.

College Daily’s readers are an advertiser’s dream: united by a clear shared interest and predominantly wealthy. Chinese students of generations past often showed up on American soil with almost no money, just a dream of turning a technical PhD into a decent salary and an American green card. But today’s Chinese students are a different breed. They are wealthier, younger, and far less invested in putting down roots in the United States. These traits often rub their classmates the wrong way, but it’s the first of those qualifications that helped spur the boom in the first place.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, American public colleges and universities saw their funding gutted. University administrators scoured the horizon for a way to replace the vanishing taxpayer support, and many of them settled on a quick fix: international students. While in-state students at public universities receive steep discounts, out-of-state or international students pay full tuition, often triple the amount of their local classmates. So schools threw open their gates to international students.

The timing turned out to be impeccable. China’s middle class was booming, and parents who had scratched their way up through an insanely competitive Chinese education system were hoping to spare their kids that same struggle. They hired English tutors, signed their kids up for SAT-prep classes, and paid “education consulting” firms huge sums to guarantee entrance at American colleges. Once that acceptance letter came, the parents were happy to fork over the $35,000 a year for the privilege of an American university degree. China quickly came to dominate international student demographics, and by 2017 China accounted for one in three international students in the U.S.³

From the outside, it looked like a perfect match: American universities could patch holes in their budgets, and Chinese students could gain exposure to a topflight international education. Beyond that financial exchange, there was also hope that these on-campus interactions could promote cultural understanding and even pull the world’s two superpowers closer together. What better way is there to promote world peace than to have the future leaders of China and the United States chugging Bud Lights with one another?

But on the ground, things weren’t exactly playing out as imagined. University administrators may have seen Chinese students as a financial life jacket, but some California students observing changing campus demographics began to ask a new question: are these foreign students subsidizing us or just replacing us? The collegiate cultural melting pot also wasn’t functioning as imagined. As the number of Chinese students grew, so too did the insularity of that group. Some Chinese students could get through four years at a UC school without truly mastering English or making more than a couple American friends.

And in many cases the politics of international campuses turned out to be more fraught than friendly. The Chinese government sometimes looked upon returning students with a wary eye, fearful that they brought with them the infectious disease of a desire for electoral democracy. American politicians turned out to share a mirror image of those suspicions. Media reports showing that the Chinese government helped fund some Chinese student groups led to fears that America was being infiltrated via its campuses. When those Chinese student groups organized campus protests against speakers they deemed “offensive,” such as the Dalai Lama, the question became whether the Chinese government was using these students to export its domestic restrictions on speech.

By 2018, the backlash against Chinese students had gone from campus politics to national politics. Prominent senators and the FBI director were all piling on, accusing the students of acting as pawns and spies in a massive Chinese government scheme to steal technology and squash dissent. In private, President Trump remarked that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy,” and he entertained a proposal for placing an outright ban on student visas for Chinese citizens.

This wasn’t how the story of Chinese students in America was supposed to go.

MISSIONARIES AND MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

It’s a story that has its origins as far back as the 1800s, when a smattering of Chinese students sailed across the Pacific to take up studies in the upstart nation known as meiguo, “beautiful country.” But even these early international scholars were burdened by expectations both political and religious. Many early arrivals were sponsored by American Christian missionaries, who hoped that they would absorb that faith and return to China to spread it among their own people. The Chinese government had other ideas. In 1872, it sponsored what became known as the Chinese Educational Mission, a group of 120 boys who were sent to America to learn the art and science of American technology, particularly military technology.⁴

At the time, imperial China was approaching an all-time low. Long confident that it possessed the most advanced civilization on earth, China had been shaken from its slumber during the two Opium Wars of the mid-1800s, when European militaries armed with modern weaponry repeatedly steamrolled the Chinese forces. The devastating Taiping Rebellion and skirmishes with Western troops drove home the message: if China wanted to hold its own as an empire, it needed to learn these technologies from the West. Officials in the Qing Dynasty approved the first batch of young Chinese men to be sent to the United States.

But as those boys settled into life in New England, they began picking up more than just Western engineering concepts. Some converted to Christianity. Others earned thoroughly American nicknames like Ajax, Fighting Chinee, and By-jinks Johnnie. The conservative Chinese official tasked with supervising the mission became alarmed that these boys were abandoning their Confucian culture and losing their loyalty to the Chinese emperor. Rubbing salt in that wound, the State Department refused to allow the Chinese students to enroll in West Point or other military academies, claiming there was no room available.

After the students completed nine of the planned fifteen years, Chinese officials canceled the mission and ordered the boys back to China, where they were detained and thoroughly interrogated on arrival. Several boys from that group would go on to take up leadership positions in the Chinese military and bureaucracy, but they couldn’t reverse the rot of the Qing Dynasty, which continued to wrestle with a love-hate relationship with the technology and culture of the West.

A year after the boys’ 1881 departure from the “beautiful country,” the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It would be nearly a hundred years before the Chinese government would send another large batch of students to learn from America.

SECOND-WAVE SCHOLARS

That next group of students made the journey at another low point for China. The year was 1978, and the country was still in a daze from the madness of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76). During that decade, China’s education systems were largely crippled by fanatical student Red Guards who tormented their teachers for teaching anything “feudal” (traditional, Confucian) or “foreign” (most modern academic and scientific knowledge that didn’t adhere to “Mao Zedong Thought”). The government sent scholars of math and science to work in coal mines and eventually dispersed the Red Guards to the Chinese countryside to “learn from the peasant farmers.” By the time the dust settled on the Cultural Revolution, China was decades behind the West in most fields of modern science and technology.

Eager to make up lost ground, China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, struck a deal with U.S. president Jimmy Carter to send a cohort of fifty-two Chinese scholars to study at a handful of American universities.⁵ They were to spend a few years immersed in fields such as computer science and return to China to plant the seeds of the country’s technological rebirth.

When the first batch of twelve scholars arrived at Princeton University, Professor Stanley Kwong was there to greet them. An assistant dean at Princeton, Professor Kwong had grown up between Hong Kong and the United States and had visited China in 1973 as part of an early delegation of Chinese American students and scholars. On that trip, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had personally asked him to help take care of Chinese students in the United States.

They needed the help. The students may have had the backing of the central government, but at the time China’s per capita GDP was on par with Rwanda’s.⁶ The scholars were kept on a tight financial leash.

“They ended up having white bread for breakfast and white bread for lunch,” Professor Kwong recalled.

To boost those nutrients, he and some other Chinese American professors would get together once a month to cook a big chicken dinner for the students. After a few years of work and study in the U.S., those scholars returned to China and took up leading posts in Chinese academia, heading up university departments and laying the foundations in new fields of study.

They were soon followed by a new kind of Chinese student: those who came to America on their own. By the mid-1980s, a steady trickle of these young Chinese began arriving in the United States. Many relied on relatives in the United States to sponsor their visas by pledging to financially support the students. But those relatives were often barely scraping out a living in Chinatown restaurants or garment factories, and the new students had to fend for themselves financially.

That meant pairing full-time studies with hard work, often as waiters in restaurants or manual laborers in factories or warehouses. Work restrictions on student visas meant much of that labor had to be done in Chinatown’s under-the-table cash economy. Earlier waves of immigrants who now ran these businesses used the students’ precarious legal position as bargaining leverage, often paying them as little as half of minimum wage.

“Whatever they could squeeze, they squeezed,” one student-turned-immigrant in San Francisco told me.

For these students, the payoff—a shot at a United States green card—was worth the struggle. China was steadily turning itself into a manufacturing powerhouse, but the economic gap between it and the United States remained enormous. In terms of quality of life, it was still better to be relatively “poor” in America than “middle-class” in China. Once these students got a hold of life in America, they didn’t want to let go.

BUDGET CUTS AND INTERNATIONAL BOOMS

What a difference a generation makes. By 2008, three decades of breakneck economic growth had produced a large cohort of very wealthy Chinese parents: factory owners, real estate developers, technology entrepreneurs, and government officials who could skim off all these industries. Having a child studying abroad became a status symbol in these circles, and Chinese applications to American colleges skyrocketed.

They found a very receptive audience in the admissions offices of American public universities. Public funding for higher education has been shrinking for several decades, but during the financial crisis of 2008 that steady decline turned into a sudden plunge.

California was a prime example of the trend. Between 2007 and 2012, California state support for public higher education (including the UC system and the parallel California State University system) dropped by $2 billion, a cut of over 30 percent.⁷ School administrators scrambled to make up the difference, but lawmakers proved indifferent to their pleas, and any attempt to raise tuition was met with protests. Henry Brady, dean of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, described the dilemma facing these schools.

“You’ve got a budget constraint, costs are going up, state funding is going down or staying steady, and you’re not allowed to increase tuition,” Brady told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re producing a Cadillac education for the cost of a Chevy, and the state’s saying you should do it at a motorcycle price. At some point you have to ask, ‘What’s realistic?’”

With their backs up against the financial wall, public universities quickly began ramping up out-of-state and international student enrollment. The logic is straightforward: these students often pay around triple the tuition of local students and generally receive no financial aid. During the 2014–15 school year, local undergraduate students at UC Berkeley paid roughly $13,328 in tuition, with 55 percent of those local students qualifying as low-income and thus paying no tuition at all. Their out-of-state and international classmates put down $36,833 for the same education and were generally excluded from public financial aid.⁸ Theoretically, every Chinese student who enrolled could effectively subsidize the tuition of two of her California classmates.

The stage was set for the great Chinese student boom.

Between 2008 and 2012 Chinese enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities grew by over 20 percent every year, according to the Institute for International Education. By 2013, total Chinese enrollment was more than triple the levels before the 2008 financial crisis, and during the 2017–18 school year, China set a record with over 360,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The country had vaulted past India as the top source of international students in the United States, and by 2017 accounted for more students in the U.S. than the next five countries combined.⁹

Big state schools, many of them in the Midwest, absorbed the largest number of Chinese students. The University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign emerged as the unlikely leader in total Chinese enrollment—the school went from hosting just 37 Chinese undergraduates in the year 2000 to enrolling nearly 3,000 by 2014.¹⁰ Flagship public campuses in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio all followed the same pattern, throwing open their doors to students from across the Pacific.

But at a statewide level, California led the nation with more than 60,000 students from the People’s Republic. Between 2007 and 2017, Chinese enrollment at the ten campuses of the University of California system (UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.) multiplied by a factor of nearly ten.¹¹ At the start of the 2017–18 school year, 22,325 Chinese students were enrolled across the UC campuses, more than double the number of African American students in the system.

FERRARIS AND CHINESE TAKEOUT

And when these students arrived, many of them did so in style. Professor Stanley Kwong had a front-row seat to the changing demographics of Chinese students. After greeting those first Chinese students at Princeton in 1978, Professor Kwong had spent the intervening thirty years as a global marketing executive for IBM. Following his retirement from IBM in 2009, he returned to academia as a professor at the University of San Francisco (USF), a private Jesuit school near the center of the city. Professor Kwong was beginning to see more and more Chinese students in his marketing classes, but it was their after-hours activities that attracted the most attention.

At the time, Professor Kwong frequently appeared as a guest on local Cantonese radio stations, discussing Chinese economics and politics. Many of his listeners lived in the Richmond neighborhood abutting USF, a quiet part of town home to many elderly immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Beginning around 2013, Professor Kwong started to get more callers in his radio programs complaining about one thing: the sound of Ferrari engines at night.

As students from mainland China increased at USF, Chinese restaurants in Richmond began adapting to the new patrons, swapping out Cantonese seafood dishes for the spice of Sichuan cuisine. They also expanded their hours, with some staying open until three a.m. to catch the students returning from a night of karaoke. The bustle of normal business was one thing for elderly neighbors, but these late-night crews often announced their presence by gunning their engines.

“If a Ferrari is driving in your neighborhood,” Professor Kwong told me, “you notice that because of the roar, right?”

Chinese students were by no means universally rich. Many middle-class Chinese parents had worked hard and saved up for decades to give their kids a chance to study in America. Some of those students spent two years at American community colleges, often working side jobs on nights and weekends, for the chance to transfer to a place like UCLA.¹² Even among students from wealthy backgrounds, most opted to keep a low profile and blend in on campus. For many of their families, a diploma from a top U.S. college stood right at the intersection of an up-by-your-bootstraps American dream and deeply held Confucian values about the paramount importance of education.

But the Ferrari-driving cohort were the most noticeable to outsiders, in part because of how different they appeared from the humble PhDs of generations past. Tim Lin had arrived in America just as the transition got under way, and College Daily documented the shifting profile of Chinese students on American campuses.

“Ten years ago nobody bought Mercedes, BMW, or luxury brands,” Tim Lin told me on my first visit to his office headquarters. “They bought second-, third-, or even fourth-hand 1995 Toyota Corollas. But right now, it’s 2015. We see a lot of students fly first-class to the U.S. When they arrive in the U.S. they’ve already bought the [luxury] car. They ask the students who are already there to buy the car first and just give them the car at the airport.”

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

It wasn’t just money that separated these Chinese students from their predecessors. They were also younger, less academically elite, and far less likely to stay in the U.S. long-term.

From the 1980s through the early 2000s, very few Chinese students enrolled in U.S. undergraduate programs. Instead, the vast majority of Chinese students at American universities were pursuing graduate studies, often PhDs in technical fields. These scholars represented the cream of the academic crop in China: products of prestigious institutions like Tsinghua or Peking University, with a track record of excellence that gained them entrance to top American research programs.

And when this group earned their degrees, they almost always stayed to work in the country. One study by the National Science Foundation showed that of Chinese students who had earned PhDs in the United States from 2002 to 2004, 86 percent of them were still in America a decade after graduating. That retention rate was tied with India for the highest of any country, and nearly triple the 32 percent stay rate of South Korean doctoral recipients.

But after 2008, all of these markers began to shift. More Chinese high school students began applying directly to U.S. colleges. They were not necessarily the highest-performing students at their schools, but rather students who could afford to enroll in international high school programs. In 2011, the number of Chinese undergrads in the UC system surpassed the number of graduate students for the first time, with that milestone replicated at the national level a couple years later.¹³ Within a few years of earning a bachelor’s degree, many of these students returned to China.

Chinese people who study abroad and then return to China are known as haigui, a pun on the Chinese word for “sea turtle” that means to return from overseas. During earlier waves of overseas study in the 1980s and 1990s, “sea turtles” were a rare breed, and when they returned home they were often rewarded with coveted positions in universities or multinational corporations. But as the number of students going abroad multiplied, so too did the number of sea turtles.

There isn’t comprehensive data on return rates among more recent arrivals, but a mix of statistical indicators and anecdotal evidence points to a sea change in decisions about whether to stay. In 2017, a record-setting 480,000 students returned to China after studying abroad. China’s Ministry of Education estimated in 2016 that return rates had risen to 70 to 80 percent beginning around 2013.¹⁴ Those numbers were approximately in line with the results of a survey on the postgraduation plans of Chinese students at Purdue University in Indiana: 57 percent planned to return to China after a few years in the U.S., while 9 percent wanted to return to China immediately and 13 percent hoped to stay in the U.S. indefinitely (21 percent said they didn’t know).¹⁵

Those shifting return rates reflect both a push (away from the U.S.) and a pull (back to China). A main factor pushing students to return is the increasing difficulty in obtaining H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill foreign citizens who have found a job in the United States. The United States caps the number of new H-1B visas each year, entering all applicants into a lottery that picks the lucky winners. Recent years have seen a steady rise in applications, while the 85,000-visa cap has remained unchanged. That means Chinese graduates who found jobs in the U.S. have seen their odds of “winning the lottery” to obtain a visa steadily fall.

But that push to return to China isn’t always as blunt as a visa rejection.

“When I graduated from college, I believed in American dreams: I can get a good living, a good future in America, we follow the rules, and blah blah blah,” Tim Lin told me. “But when we start to work we realize there is a glass [ceiling] for Chinese students.”

Tim bumped up against that glass in his first job out of college, at an accounting firm in San Jose, California. What initially looked like a promising gig quickly fizzled over cultural barriers. Tim felt lost during Sunday football parties with the firm’s partners, and what he saw at management levels told him the deck was stacked against Chinese and other Asians when it came to promotions.

Earlier generations of Chinese graduates often had to swallow their pride and stick with these jobs; their H-1B visa, and chance of obtaining a U.S. green card, depended on it. But China’s economic transformation and the wealthier family background of many of these students have changed that calculus. An American degree is no longer the golden ticket out of an impoverished country. For many of these students, especially those who are heirs to a successful family business, their earning potential is higher in their home country.

That reversal of fortunes is changing the way these students approach their time at school. In many places, the undergrad lifestyles of Chinese students in the U.S. are starting to resemble that of many Americans: a time to cut loose, have fun, and explore.

“They are enjoying the time studying there,” observed Tim. “They’re not pursuing some better life. They can have a better life back in China.”

“HIGHER EDUCATION HOLOCAUST” OR “UPWARD-MOBILITY MACHINE”?

Not everyone was so happy about these changes. In a 2014 editorial titled “UCSD Is Selling Our Seats to the Rich,” the student newspaper of Southwestern College, a community college in San Diego County, railed against the rise in foreign enrollment at the University of California, San Diego. Between the freshmen classes of 2007 and 2013, UCSD had multiplied its Chinese admissions by a factor of eight, from 258 to 2,099.¹⁶ The newspaper’s staff accused UCSD of perpetrating a “higher education holocaust” by simultaneously accepting progressively fewer transfer students from the local community college.

“UCSD flat out does not want Southwestern College students,” the editors wrote. “We do not bring in as much cash as foreign students. Guilty as charged.”

The accompanying cartoon showed UCSD’s chancellor sitting at a desk with overflowing boxes of applications labeled “out-of-state” and “foreign,” casually dropping applications from Southwestern College students in a paper shredder.

“UCSD has all but sealed shut the doors for first-generation college scholars from working-class families, most of them under-represented minorities,” the newspaper’s staff wrote. “No one here is accusing UCSD of intentional racism, but discrimination does not always burn crosses and wear hoods.”

Criticism of growing foreign enrollment also came in the more measured tone of a report from the California State Auditor. That report ran with the self-explanatory title “The University of California: Its Admissions and Financial Decisions Have Disadvantaged California Resident Students.” It accused the UCs of padding budgets by lowering admissions standards for out-of-state and foreign students, all while making things harder on local students.

“Despite a 52 percent increase in resident applicants, resident enrollment increased by only 10 percent over the last 10 years while nonresident enrollment increased by 432 percent,” the report stated.

The report took particular umbrage with a 2011 decision to change official admission standards for nonresidents: instead of requiring that they “generally be in the upper half of admitted students,” the UCs now only asked that nonresidents “compare favorably to California residents admitted.” As a result, between 2009 and 2014, additional tuition generated from nonresident enrollment (the amount over and above what local students pay) rose from $325 million to $728 million.¹⁷ During that period, the percentage of UC students from California had fallen from 89 to 81 percent.¹⁸

The California State Auditor used much of the remainder of the report to criticize the financial management of the UCs, accusing them of insufficiently adhering to recommendations from previous audits and paying excessive salaries to UC administrators. It recommended the legislature amend state law to cap nonresident enrollment at the UCs, and to make continued public funding for the system contingent on not exceeding those caps.

Predictably, UC leadership was not happy. In a strongly worded letter to the auditor, UC president Janet Napolitano rejected the fundamental premises of the report, arguing that the UCs essentially had no choice but to massively increase nonresident enrollment. She pointed out that the UCs have three main sources of funding: state appropriations (which were cut by 33 percent); resident tuition (which causes student protests when raised); and nonresident tuition (which the UCs increased to make up the difference). Using the auditor’s own estimate of $728 million in additional nonresident revenue, Napolitano argued that eliminating this sum would mean a 20 percent tuition hike for all local students.

Beyond pleading helplessness in the face of budget cuts, the UC response argued that it had actually expanded enrollment for disadvantaged students. From 2007 to 2016, the UC system increased its percentage of underrepresented minorities (17 to 25 percent), first-generation college students (36 to 42 percent), and Pell Grant recipients (a proxy for low- and middle-income families, 30 to 38 percent). At UCSD, the school charged with perpetrating the “higher education holocaust,” those three categories of students all held steady or increased.¹⁹

Those stats earned the UC system national recognition in The New York Times’s annual College Access Index, a ranking of schools “doing the most for the American dream,” based on tuition, enrollment, and graduation rates for low- and middle-income students. UC schools dominate the rankings, taking the top five spots in 2015 and 2017. The Times dubbed the UC system “California’s Upward-Mobility Machine.”

Yes, Chinese students were entering the UC system, but their tuition dollars were also a source of fuel that kept the machine running.

BLACK CATS ON SKYPE

It wasn’t just the sheer number of Chinese students that was causing frictions on American campuses. It was also how they got there.

Troubles first surfaced at USF during freshmen orientation in 2012. The school had begun ramping up Chinese enrollment a few years earlier, but some members of the administration feared there was a language barrier when communicating with the new arrivals. So one enterprising dean decided to offer headsets with simultaneous English-to-Mandarin translation for the Chinese students during a welcome ceremony. It probably sounded like a decent idea in the abstract, a way to accommodate students from “diverse backgrounds.”

But the optics—dozens of Chinese students putting on headphones to understand a welcome lecture at their school—were all off. It had their American classmates and teachers asking the same question: “If they can’t understand English, why are they here?” The move felt like an insult to the American students who had worked hard to get accepted. Professors felt the language barrier was messing with classroom dynamics, reducing discussion, and forcing them to dumb down their language to be understood. One associate dean at USF’s business school quit soon after the orientation.

There was some important context to the headset fiasco. Like many schools, USF admitted some Chinese students on a conditional basis, requiring them to take anything from a semester to multiple years of English classes before joining undergrad classes. Those ESL students usually pay full university tuition but attend classes taught by retired high school teachers, a lucrative side hustle for these schools.

But the incident still shone a spotlight on the uncomfortable truth that neither Chinese students nor school administrators wanted to acknowledge: Chinese applications to U.S. universities are rife with fraud.

Rapid expansion of U.S. admissions spawned a cottage industry of “education consulting” companies. Employing young Americans living in China, these companies often charge fees ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 to help Chinese kids apply to U.S. colleges. The services they offer are on a spectrum as well, from totally legitimate admissions guidance to the ghostwriting of essays and the fabrication of extracurricular activities. A friend of mine who worked for an education consulting company in Beijing described the business proposition in simple terms: “The more you pay, the more we promise.”

For 250,000 RMB (roughly $40,000), the company would guarantee entrance to a top-twenty-five school in the US News & World Report rankings. For around half that amount, it would promise a certain level of involvement in selecting schools, crafting personal statements, and coaching the student for taking the SATs and English-proficiency TOEFL test.

Reporting a Chinese student’s high school grades brought its own challenges and opportunities. Most schools there use number rather than letter grades, and they tend to grade dramatically harder than U.S. schools; the grade of the best Chinese student in a class of 300 might translate to B+ if converted directly to the American system. So many students, schools, and parents work together to create a better-looking transcript. My friend who worked as an educational consultant put it bluntly: “If a parent is actually influential and has money, then that high school Chinese transcript is like a chalkboard.”

What emerged at the end of this application process was often a polished picture of a brilliant Chinese student who was full of potential and fluent in English. When many of those students arrived on campus with severely limited English skills, colleges quickly realized something was amiss.

Some schools began requiring Skype interviews for their Chinese applicants, hoping to at least ferret out students whose language skills couldn’t cut it. But these schools discovered that even a live conversation with the real applicant could be faked. A report on admissions fraud by Vericant, a Beijing-based company that conducts certified video interviews for schools, recounted the story of one Skype interview gone wrong:

As they began, the [admissions] officer noticed the ear of a black cat in the student’s lap. Although the officer thought it was strange, he continued with the interview. At one point mid-way through the interview the “cat” moved, and the admissions officer was astonished to realize there was a woman lying in the student’s lap! The woman, presumably the mother, had been there throughout the interview, whispering answers to her daughter.²⁰

Stunts like the whispering cat-mom can be anything from comical to criminal. As the full scope of admissions fraud became apparent, some observers began to pin the blame on Chinese culture, invoking stereotypes about Chinese people as devious, corrupt, or unconcerned with morality.

But American universities—institutions with “truth” and “justice” carved into their ivy-framed plaques—were often just as complicit. My friend’s company funneled a good portion of its highest-paying students through one admissions officer at a prestigious California university. A student’s application would have to be polished, and their test scores above a certain threshold, but beyond that the officer could work to push the student through the admissions committee. At the end of the day, all parties had a sense of what was going on.

“On the admissions side, are they shocked that these things were forged, that the integrity of their academic program is jeopardized? Are they mad?” my friend asked. “Or did they say, ‘Yo, we have a budget deficit. We need $450,000 from international students over the next year. Give me the best you can.’”

“THEY NEVER REALLY LEFT CHINA”

Education consultants helped the two sides navigate the admissions process. But once the Chinese students landed on U.S. soil, platforms like College Daily took on the duties of cross-cultural translation. Even if a student’s English skills were up to snuff, getting a handle on the many facets of life in America—pop culture, politics, and dating apps—could still be daunting.

In that process, the sheer number of Chinese students could be a handicap. Earlier waves of Chinese students were immediately thrown into the deep end: they were largely cut off from their home country and surrounded by American peers. Students who didn’t learn English and make friends with Americans would live a very lonely existence. But by 2012, many American universities had reached a critical mass of Chinese students such that they didn’t need to venture outside their own circles: they only made Chinese friends, consumed Chinese-language media, and spoke Mandarin all day long.

Tim Lin had chosen Miami University specifically because it would force him to make friends with Americans, and he lamented the inward turn of more recent arrivals: “You could say they never really left China.”

No app or news platform can force these students to engage with their American peers, but College Daily did its best to give them the tools they would need if they wanted to venture outside their comfort zone. The articles clearly resonated with an audience: by fall 2015, College Daily boasted over 400,000 subscribers to its daily publications, a number that far exceeded the 300,000 Chinese students in the United States.

When I visited Tim’s Beijing headquarters that year, his team of editors and writers were busy mashing up the day’s slate of news, gossip, and life hacks. The articles are largely written by Chinese students in the U.S., and they reflect their needs: how-to guides on applying for a green card, pointers for using Tinder (“Those interested in Chinese people are just in it for the novelty”), and think pieces on Donald Trump (“taking America charging hysterically into the unknown—a place with politics, dark humor and 100% naturally grown hair”).

Reading those stories gives a window into an activity familiar to many Americans, whether they’re immigrants to this country or students spending a semester in Spain: piecing together the puzzle of a country and a culture not your own.

A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS

People like Tim were working overtime to bridge the gap for Chinese students, to interest and engage them with American culture. It was much rarer to find Americans engaged in the same project, trying to understand their new Chinese classmates and where they were coming from. Exploring that background—the education system, family expectations, and college application process—goes a long way toward understanding the sources of cultural frictions once Chinese students arrive in the states.

I dove into that background while profiling a pair of identical twin brothers who were high school seniors in Beijing: Ding Xuanyu and Ding Xuancheng. They had grown up going to the same schools, hanging out with the same friends, and playing the same sports. But when it came time to think about college, their paths diverged. Xuanyu preferred to stay in China, while Xuancheng (English name: Frank) decided he wanted to study in America.

Both of those choices seemed like natural fits for the guys. Xuanyu was a bit more serious and studious; Frank leaned more extroverted and expressive. Xuanyu had a close-cropped haircut; Frank sported a more stylish flop, with one side shaved close and the rest grown out. But what really separated them for that last year of high school were the different college application processes they faced.

For the vast majority of Chinese high school students, applying to university means one thing: passing the country’s notorious college entrance exam, the gaokao (pronounced “gow-cow”). Their score on that two-day test will be the sole determinant of which—if any—college they gain admission to. High school grades get thrown out, extracurriculars don’t exist, and no college wants to see your “personal statement.” It all comes down to gaokao.

The test is sometimes compared to the SAT, but in reality there is no comparison. Gaokao is an all-consuming black hole at the end of high school, the culmination of over a decade of intellectual cramming that makes American high schools look like daycare centers. High school seniors often study more than twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week. Some extreme schools have even hooked students up to IV drips during cram sessions and installed suicide nets at student dorms.

Xuanyu’s high school was progressive by Chinese standards, but hearing him recount his gaokao preparation regimen left me feeling pathetically weak of will. Monday through Friday he would be in class, taking practice tests or studying from 8 a.m. to 11:25 p.m., with an hour each for lunch and dinner. He would take Friday evening after dinner off, and then put in two more eight-hour days of studying on both Saturday and Sunday.

As draining as gaokao may be, it has the virtue of simplicity: a single test score and a single standard for admissions. It is also widely perceived as a fundamentally fair system in a nation where personal connections and casual corruption often erode public trust.

By choosing to study in America, Frank opted out of the gaokao pressure cooker. But what American college admissions lacked in intensity, they made up for in complexity: AP classes, extracurricular activities, TOEFL tests, the SAT test, SAT subject tests, letters of recommendation, and personal statements.

That last item can be particularly puzzling for Chinese students. Frank is an engaging and curious student with good English. He likes to dance and sketch and will reference eighth-century Chinese poetry while discussing current New York fashion trends. But when it came time to write a personal statement, his ideas about the essay reflected Chinese values that do not translate well to the American admissions context.

“I thought maybe in a good personal statement you’ll just show off your strong will to the guy reading this,” he told me. “Like you’ll just say, ‘I focused on studying math for four years.’”

Some time working with an education consultant set Frank straight. The company Frank’s family hired for the process was on the more legitimate end of the spectrum, helping him brainstorm topics and proofreading the essays. He ended up writing about the inspiration he drew from Joyce Carol Oates and his nostalgia for fishing in his family’s ancestral village. Those essays helped him gain entrance to the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he enrolled that fall.

Frank’s decision to go abroad was a personal one: a chance to explore a new country and culture. But for his twin, Xuanyu, the choice of where to study was imbued with broader social dimensions.

“If everyone just goes to America, China will never truly develop,” he told me. “If China wants to grow into its own country—not just a second America—Chinese people need to feel more responsibility for their nation.”

For Xuanyu, that meant cultivating and reimagining the intellectual traditions that made China distinct.

“Lots of people in my generation love entertainment and international things. They’re going toward a kind of uniformity, where everything is the same across countries,” he said. “China has its own unique things, like Confucius and Taoist thinking. It’s just that they haven’t been fully expressed.”

That fear of losing Chinese culture in the whitewashing of a Western education goes back as far the 1880s, when Confucian officials ordered By-jinks Johnnie and his classmates to return immediately to the Middle Kingdom. But as I spent more time on American campuses, I began to hear echoes of that age-old concern coming from the Chinese students themselves. To understand how they handled this cross-cultural tug-of-war, I signed up to be a judge at a Mandarin-language speech contest down the road from my apartment, at UC Berkeley.

“THAT’S WHY WE TRY TO FIT IN”

First up at today’s qualifying round is a Chinese student who goes by the English name Ham. Dressed in a black jacket and a crisp Golden State Warriors baseball cap, Ham is holding forth in Mandarin on one of today’s three speech prompts: When a fellow student says they’re depressed, are they just trying to get attention? Ham doesn’t think so. He cites statistics on mental health and draws out a metaphor around sneezing, colds, and cries for help. He’s a great public speaker, and I recommend that he advance to the next round.

Today’s contest is being put on by a Chinese coworking space in San Francisco. A dozen students, almost all of them Berkeley undergrads, are competing to be a contestant on the internet TV show that the company will film in a few weeks. Tryouts are being held in a small classroom on the third floor of a building on UC Berkeley’s campus. Tomorrow we’ll head down to Stanford and repeat the selection process with Chinese students and recent graduates in the area. My friend Tina is managing this event for the coworking space, and she invited me to act as a judge.

I’ve been on a decent number of Chinese internet and television shows, and I know what my role is: speak some Chinese for the cameras and add that “international” flavor. I agreed to do it as a favor for Tina, but also because I wanted to hear what these students thought about the third debate prompt: “Should Chinese students pretend to be different than they are to blend into American culture?”

It’s a question close to my own heart. I spent over five years in China desperately working to pick up the language, inflections, and mannerisms of the people around me. I wanted so badly to be able to understand what made them tick and to express myself in a way that resonated. It mostly worked. By the end of my time there I felt totally comfortable navigating those worlds, using Mandarin to express my own thoughts. My favorite thing to do was put those skills to work sharing parts of California culture with Chinese people. I started an Ultimate Frisbee team with one of my best friends there and put up goofy online videos teaching the sport.

All of that feel-good cultural exchange was facilitated by a form of national and racial privilege: many Chinese people are excited to learn about American culture, and they’re often very happy to meet an American (especially a white American) who is interested in their culture. Speaking even a little bit of Chinese wins undeserved accolades, and there’s often a tacit understanding that when it comes to the best movies, TV, music, and sports, America is the place to be.

Linghong Zhang got a much different reception when she tried to share her own culture with Americans. She’s a freshman at Berkeley, and the fifth speaker in today’s contest. Linghong talks about growing up in a part of southern China where locals still valued sons over daughters, a tendency that put a chip on her shoulder from a young age. She came to Los Angeles during high school, living with a Mexican family while attending local schools.

But Linghong felt isolated. She spoke English with a heavy accent, didn’t get her classmates’ jokes, and felt that they looked down on her. So she went to work learning their culture. She watched six seasons of The Vampire Diaries and pretended that she liked the same shows as the other girls. But she still felt like they didn’t really accept her, and she thought she knew why: people don’t want to be friends with someone pretending to be interested in the same stuff as them. She decided to stop faking it and take pride in her own culture.

A couple years later, Linghong was volunteering at an international film event, staffing the desk for one of China’s most famous animation companies. She was a big fan of cartoons and was proud to be representing the company as it promoted The Monkey King, an animated film inspired by the protagonist of China’s most famous novel, Journey to the West. But when she tried to talk to an American director about the movie, he laughed it off. He told her no one in America was going to watch it. When she tried to argue with him, he offered her a bet: he would give her $200 if she could find ten Americans who had heard of the Monkey King. She scavenged the event for people who knew about this treasure of Chinese culture. She came up empty, unable to find a single American who had any idea what she was talking about.

It felt like a slap in the face. It reminded her that “mainstream” or “global” culture is basically defined by what American people like. But the more she thought about it, the more she put the blame on her own people.

“Chinese people aren’t confident enough,” she tells our panel of three judges. “With something like the Monkey King—the essence of our culture—we’re embarrassed to bring it out and show it to our American classmates.”

It’s clear that this touches a nerve with Linghong. Her Mandarin keeps picking up speed as she talks, and I put down my pen to listen closely. For just a moment, I think that she’s on the verge of bursting into tears. Linghong has lived in America for several years, learned a new language, and earned admission to one of the country’s best universities. But despite all that—or maybe because of it—she feels ever more acutely that on a deep level, Chinese people lack confidence in their own country.

“That’s why we always think foreign culture is better than our own. That’s why we”—and here she switches to English—“try to fit in.”

“WHAT A BIG TREE”

Tensions over assimilation spanned both the personal and the political. Chinese students in the United States have long served as a screen on which the two countries project their hopes and fears when it comes to technology, theology, and politics.

Many Americans have imagined that these students’ time in the United States will give them an eye-opening introduction to the wonders of liberal democracy. Finally free to read, think, and say what they want, these students will learn the truth about political repression in their home country. Many will choose to stay in this land of the free, and those who return home could well turn into seeds for a movement that will finally bring democracy to the People’s Republic of China. In the end, these students and their home country will become “more like us.”

There’s a historical basis for these kinds of hopes. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the revolutionary movement that overthrew China’s last dynasty in 1911, was deeply influenced by Western political ideas, having studied under British missionaries in Hawaii and converted to Christianity in Hong Kong. Sun was actually in Denver on a fund-raising trip when he learned the revolution he was plotting had broken out unexpectedly.

Many of the men who would go on to lead the Chinese Communist Party itself had their political awakenings while studying in the West. Deng Xiaoping—a longtime CCP leader who both spearheaded China’s economic reforms and ordered the tanks toward Tiananmen Square—first encountered Marxism in France in the 1920s. There he met other young intellectuals like Zhou Enlai, who sought to study the political and social structures of Western countries and use that foreign knowledge to “save China.” They ended up forming Chinese Communist cells, laying the groundwork for the eventual overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and the creation of a “new China” led by the CCP.

During the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese students in the U.S. engaged in vigorous public debates about democracy and the future of China. Professor Stanley Kwong used to drop in on these debates at UC Berkeley, with some conservative students arguing for the more incremental reforms and others calling for full-on transition to a democratic political system. Following the CCP’s violent crackdown in Beijing, the U.S. government allowed any Chinese students who were in the U.S. at the time to obtain permanent residency here if they feared persecution in their home country.

Students in the most recent wave have shown far less interest in fomenting revolution. Most of them have known nothing but rising standards of living and a steady elevation of China’s place in the world, changes that have opened up vast new life possibilities for them and their parents.

But the CCP has remained suspicious of what these students are learning overseas and what they’re bringing home. The Ministry of Education and other organs of the Chinese state have regularly singled out overseas students as priority targets for “political education” that will imbue them with greater levels of “patriotic energy” while overseas and after returning home. That brand of paternalistic “guidance” has sometimes taken the form of censorship.

On June 4, 2016, Tim Lin’s College Daily published what looked like a relatively innocuous post: a picture of a tree. Above it was written, “Today we’re suspending publication for one day. Reply with the words ‘What a Big Tree’ to read yesterday’s story.”

Readers who replied to the post with the prescribed phrase were sent a small commemoration of Hu Yaobang, the relatively liberal general secretary of the CCP during the early 1980s. Hu had worked toward greater political reforms but had been forced to resign in 1987 after refusing to discipline the leaders of pro-democracy demonstrations on college campuses. When Hu died in 1989, commemorations of his life had been the spark that ignited the student protest movement in Tiananmen Square. During the movement, a poem memorializing Hu was set to music and sung in both mourning and hope. The title: “What a Big Tree.” The College Daily post on June 4—the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown—was a not-so-subtle commemoration of that movement and those who lost their lives.

The response was swift. The post was quickly taken down and College Daily was blocked from publishing anything for one month. The punishment was something between a slap on the wrist and truly damaging retaliation. During that month, Tim’s team opened other accounts that allowed them to continue publishing, though the work didn’t reach nearly as many readers. When the month was up and College Daily went back to publishing, Tim put out a post boasting that their subscribers had actually increased during the publishing blackout.

Behind the scenes, Tim was more cautious. He told me he’d learned his lesson and wouldn’t be putting something like that out again. What had begun as a passion project was now a business, one with a responsibility to its investors and the employees who counted on it for their salary every month.

But even that caution was no guarantee against interference. A couple months after getting publishing privileges back, Tim began planning College Daily’s election-night coverage for the showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He planned and advertised a live stream from the publication’s New York office, with College Daily writers and editors explaining the mechanics of the electoral college and breaking down returns in real time. And then, just a couple hours before the stream was set to begin, they got a call from the relevant authorities. There was to be no live stream. No explanation was given, and the decision was not up for debate.

#CHINESESTUDENTSMATTER

Censoring public discussion in China is one thing, but after the 2016 election, worries began to mount that China was exporting some of those restrictions to U.S. campuses—and Chinese students were acting as the conduit.

The issue made national headlines in the spring of 2017, when UC San Diego announced its pick to deliver that year’s commencement address: His Holiness the Dalai Lama. UCSD’s administration probably thought they’d scored a major coup by securing the long-exiled Tibetan leader. If they did, the feeling didn’t last long.

Within hours of the announcement, Chinese student groups were issuing statements of protest, claiming that the invitation “contravened the spirit of respect, tolerance, equality, and earnestness” upon which the university was built. They demanded a meeting with the UC chancellor and vowed to protest the speech. The leader of those calls was the local chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which declared that it had already contacted the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles regarding the matter.

What was all the fuss about? In the West, the Dalai Lama is viewed as an apolitical symbol of universal love, a mascot for world peace and Buddhist wisdom. But the Chinese government still views and portrays him as an enemy of the state and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” At issue is the status of Tibet, a region that for centuries has seesawed between independence and Chinese rule. The current Dalai Lama was just a child when the People’s Republic of China regained control of Tibet in 1950. Ever since he fled the country for India during a 1959 uprising, China has blamed him for instigating unrest in the region. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly issues indignant statements of protest when heads of state invite the Dalai Lama to visit, and it does its best to keep his message from reaching the Chinese people.

But this time the outrage over a Dalai Lama speech was coming from a different source: the students themselves, the very people who were supposed to be basking in their newfound freedom to access information censored in their home country.

That reaction surprised many Americans who had taken for granted the idea that Chinese students becoming “more like us” meant falling into lockstep with mainstream American political values. Conversations with, and surveys of, Chinese students revealed a far more complex picture.

A 2016 Purdue University survey of over 800 Chinese students at a Big Ten school revealed that exposure to America was no guarantee of more positive opinions about U.S. political values. Students in the survey were asked whether their time in the U.S. left them with more positive or more negative impressions of both the United States and their home country. When it came to the United States, the students were evenly split: 26 percent gained a more positive view of America, while 29 percent had a more negative view (44 percent reported no change).

On views of China, the results skewed positive: 44 percent reported a more positive view of their home country, while only 17 percent felt more negatively toward their home country during their time abroad. When asked about their views on democracy as a form of government, the students were divided: 37 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that it is the best form of government, while 28.1 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement (35 percent felt “neutral”).

Chinese students may not have wholeheartedly embraced America’s take on liberal democracy, but they did tap into the protest zeitgeist on U.S. college campuses. The UCSD controversy played out during a period of major tumult on U.S. college campuses, with student protests often shutting down public lectures by people they deemed objectionable. Chinese students at UCSD were now latching onto the vocabulary of those protests: “diversity,” “inclusive spaces,” and “respect for all cultures.” They deployed it in public statements and hundreds of Facebook comments criticizing the decision.

Some called the decision “insulting” to Chinese students’ heritage; others compared it to inviting Osama bin Laden or white supremacist David Duke to deliver the commencement. One Chinese student captured the zeitgeist in a melodramatic hashtag: #ChineseStudentsMatter.

THE LONG ARM OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT

Not everyone saw the protest as a shining example of student activism. Many media accounts of the affair cited a claim by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) that it had been in touch with the Chinese consulate, pointing to that contact as evidence that the Chinese government was using student groups to censor political speech abroad. The incident put CSSAs in the national spotlight, and journalists began investigating how the “long arm” of the CCP was reaching onto American campuses.

Most universities with a large contingent of Chinese students play host to a CSSA chapter. Those chapters act as hubs for Chinese students on campus: organizing orientation events, hosting job fairs with Chinese companies, and putting on the school’s annual Chinese New Year Gala. For many Chinese students, the CSSA is the organization that gives them a sense of community and helps them find their footing on a foreign campus.

CSSAs also maintain relationships with the Chinese government, often via the nearest Chinese embassy or consulate. Chapter presidents often gather at the consulate once per semester for meetings or dinners, and the chapters provide the consulates with student volunteers for public events. In return, the embassy or consulate will appropriate a certain level of funds to each CSSA, often between a few hundred and a couple thousand dollars per semester. That money goes toward organizing events like the New Year Gala, a major undertaking with mountains of food and lots of live performances.

But money from the embassy also sometimes goes toward political activities. In early 2018, Foreign Policy reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian began publishing a series of reports on the ways the Chinese government mobilizes CSSAs for its own purposes. When President Xi Jinping was visiting Washington, D.C., in 2015, the Chinese embassy reportedly asked local CSSAs to bring students out to line the streets for his motorcade, offering twenty dollars to each student who came out. During a major CCP political gathering in the fall of 2017, the consulates reportedly asked the CSSAs to organize “watch parties” on campus for Chinese students and to send back pictures and reports on the events. In other pieces, Allen-Ebrahimian described how a reference to Taiwan—the self-governing island locked in a multidecade dispute with the PRC—was removed from her personal biography at an event sponsored by the Confucius Institute.

American analysts began to refer to these activities as “influence operations”—an umbrella term for any attempts by the Chinese state to affect American institutions or alter the parameters of discussion on U.S. soil. Several CSSA student officials interviewed by Allen-Ebrahimian said that the consulates had increased the emphasis on political activities in recent years, beginning around 2016.

“I feel like the tendency is that the consulate tries to control CSSAs more and more,” one chapter president told Foreign Policy. “I don’t think this student group should be involved with government in any way.”

Speaking with CSSA officials at several California universities, I got a mixed bag of responses about political pressures. Yin Yikai, the president of the Stanford CSSA, said that his group received little funding and no political marching orders from the nearby consulate. He described the events in San Diego as an “extreme” case and said that his organization focused on safety issues and social events.

But members of other CSSAs described a rising emphasis on “political education,” particularly during major CCP events like the Nineteenth Party Congress in the fall of 2017. Along with organizing watch parties on their home campuses, CSSA presidents were reportedly required to write an essay on what the “spirit of the Nineteenth Party Congress” meant to them.

In one instance, a CSSA member told me about being asked to report on the activities of fellow Chinese classmates. The student attended a historically Christian university and said that the local consulate was worried these students would be targeted for conversion by Christian groups. They described being invited to the consulate multiple times and asked by the consul general which students were falling under the influence of Christian groups. When I asked if the consulate did anything based on the information, they said the consulate would only act if the students appeared to be forming religious groups “like Falun Gong,” a persecuted spiritual group in China.

What was most striking—and troubling—about that conversation was that despite having lived in the United States for over six years, the students appeared to have no idea that reporting on the religious activities of other students would be seen as a deep affront to American values and freedoms. To them, low-level surveillance of your peers’ religious beliefs just felt like business as usual.

HIS HOLINESS AT UCSD

But even during the Dalai Lama affair at UCSD, the picture was more complicated than it initially appeared. Yes, the CSSA was spearheading the Dalai Lama protests, and yes, they had contacted the consulate about the event. But conversations with the actual students involved revealed that it wasn’t the Chinese government pulling the strings.

While delivering a lecture at UCSD in 2018, I arranged to meet Lisa Hou, a junior and an officer in the school’s CSSA. Lisa is from a midsize city in southwest China, and before arriving at UCSD she had hoped to study philosophy. But upon arrival she discovered that her English wasn’t up to the obtuse verbiage of philosophy. When it came to improving her language skills, it didn’t help that her roommate and almost all the girls on her freshman dorm’s hall were other Chinese students. Lisa decided to major in math and computer science, and she joined the CSSA.

She said news of the Dalai Lama’s visit triggered an immediate reaction among Chinese students, including herself. That reaction didn’t stem from a deep-seated hatred of the Dalai Lama himself, but rather from a sense that the university didn’t understand or care about how Chinese students would feel.

“Normally, Chinese students are completely silent. We have no influence or voice,” she told me. “When we speak, no one really listens. So we felt that we definitely want to stand up and say something.”

Members of the CSSA leadership quickly fired off a public statement on the group’s WeChat account, including the part about contacting the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles. For them, the reference to the consulate conveyed gravitas and the seriousness of the situation. For outsiders, it made the students look like stooges of a foreign government. Lisa felt it was a mistake, but they had to move on.

The CSSA planned to hold a small protest along the school’s Library Walk, a stretch of sidewalk where student groups frequently hand out flyers and put up posters for different causes. Lisa was put in charge of preparing material for their informational posters. She didn’t know much about the Dalai Lama growing up. She had heard a little about him during the 2008 riots in Tibet, but only really began to read about his work while preparing the posters.

In doing that research, Lisa decided to use Western sources because the Chinese ones were “really biased.” As she read on, she found that she agreed with many of the Dalai Lama’s current teachings about compassion and tolerance. But she also felt that his pristine public image in the West obscured his political past, such as the fact that he and his organization took millions of dollars of financing from the CIA during the 1960s.²¹

The posters Lisa ended up creating had titles such as “Why Is the Dalai Lama Controversial?” and “Monk or Politician?” They displayed copies of declassified U.S. intelligence documents on the CIA’s payment to him and quotes from Western historians about institutional serfdom in Tibet during the Dalai Lama’s rule there.

On the appointed day, members of the CSSA propped those posters up along the Library Walk and tried to engage passing students in conversation. The reception was not always friendly.

“Tons of people doubted or questioned us. Whatever we would say about the Dalai Lama, they’d bring up things from Chinese history. They’d say, ‘Well, can you explain Tiananmen to me?’” she told me. “They don’t actually care about this. The feeling I got from them was, ‘No matter what you say, it’s ridiculous, because you’re from an authoritarian country and you don’t have freedom of speech.’”

It was a frustrating line of argument for the Chinese students. Lisa wanted to tell them that China had changed a lot, that there was a kind of freedom of speech even if it had limits, and that she wasn’t ignorant of the problems in her own country. But it was difficult to get that across in a back-and-forth with students who believed her to be fundamentally brainwashed. They weren’t going to change too many minds here, and the UCSD administration had said early on that it would not consider canceling the appearance by His Holiness.

Still, looking back on the event, Lisa was proud of what they achieved.

“I felt like it was successful,” she told me. “If there’s debate, then that’s a success, because at least we were able to show them another side of things.”

“WHOLE-OF-SOCIETY THREAT”

If students like Lisa had a hard time convincing their fellow students they weren’t brainwashed, they were going to have an even harder time convincing the FBI they weren’t spies. On February 13, 2018, the heads of the six major intelligence agencies sat down opposite the Senate Intelligence Committee for a hearing on threats posed by Russian hackers, North Korean missiles, and other “worldwide threats.” But when it came time for Senator Marco Rubio to pose a question to the panel, he zeroed in on a new topic.

“What, in your view,” he asked FBI director Christopher Wray, “is the counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics?”

Wray launched into a discussion of China’s use of “nontraditional collectors”—students, professors, and scientists—to infiltrate U.S. academic institutions and gather things of value. He said that reports of these activities were coming in from nearly all the FBI field offices, covering all major disciplines.

“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have—which we all revere—but they’re taking advantage of it,” Wray told the committee. “So one of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end. And I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.”

On the one hand, Wray was stating the obvious: all countries try to use the assets at their disposal to conduct espionage on each other. There happen to be a large number of Chinese students at U.S. universities, many of them working in cutting-edge fields, and China’s spy agencies are certainly trying to turn some of those students into intelligence assets. The United States intelligence community would be derelict in its duties if it wasn’t trying to do the same thing.

But Wray’s choice of words—“whole-of-society threat”—set off alarm bells in some quarters. That phrase seemed to cast suspicion on all Chinese students, and perhaps even Chinese Americans. A coalition of prominent Asian American community organizations wrote an open letter to Wray expressing “feelings of both anger and sadness” at his remarks, warning that such generalizations will lead to racial profiling against Chinese people.

The groups had reason to be worried. In the years prior to Wray’s remarks, a string of prominent Chinese American researchers had been investigated, arrested, and charged with espionage, only to have the cases against them prove unfounded. The public humiliation and damage to their reputations led several scientists to simply relocate back to China afterward.

But the FBI chief’s testimony crystallized a growing trend in Washington, D.C.: the tendency to view Chinese students as pawns or puppets working on behalf of the CCP, suppressing free speech on American soil or stealing our advanced technology. It was a transition that reflected the sea change in the balance of power between the two countries. When China was poor and weak, these students were welcomed as aspiring immigrants or the seeds of China’s democratic future. But as the People’s Republic became a legitimate strategic counterweight to U.S. power, the students were looked upon with suspicion, as foreign agents or intellectual leeches, sapping the United States of its hard-earned edge in advanced technology.

Those sentiments came to a rolling boil during an Oval Office meeting in the spring of 2018. With backlash against the students mounting and a trade war looming, President Trump’s influential policy adviser Stephen Miller pushed a draconian proposal: a full ban on student visas for all Chinese citizens. Miller had staked out a position as one of Trump’s far-right advisers, and he was instrumental in shaping President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. According to a report in the Financial Times, he argued that along with hurting China, a ban on the students would also be a blow to the elite Ivy League universities and their faculty, who comprised some of Trump’s harshest critics.

With President Trump undecided on the proposal, he convened a meeting with both Miller and his ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, the former governor of Iowa. Ambassador Branstad pushed back against the ban, arguing that it would do more damage to small colleges in places like Iowa, which had come to rely on the students. Chinese enrollment at the University of Iowa has skyrocketed after the financial crisis, and by 2015 Chinese students were paying an estimated $70 million in tuition and adding over $100 million to the local economy. Over the course of the Oval Office meeting, President Trump came to side with Ambassador Branstad, who himself had graduated from the University of Iowa. Turning to his ambassador, the president reportedly joked, “Not everyone can go to Harvard or Princeton, right, Terry?”

Instead of the outright ban, he opted for a more targeted approach. In May of 2018, the Trump administration issued new restrictions on visas for Chinese graduate students in fields such as robotics, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing. Validity of their visas would be reduced from five years to one. In a tweet following the new restrictions, Senator Rubio hailed the decision as a “great move!” He described Chinese student visas as “weapons” that the government uses in a concerted campaign to “steal & cheat their way to world dominance.” The prospect of much tighter restrictions continued to loom large. In August of 2018, President Trump told a group of American business executives at a private dinner that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.”

It was a bizarre twist in the story of Chinese students in the U.S. As far back as the 1800s, Americans have imagined that Chinese students arriving in the U.S. would suddenly see the light—whether that light be Christianity or liberal democracy. Many of the Middle Kingdom’s best and brightest would choose to settle down in the land of the free, and those who returned to China would act as a Trojan horse for American ideals. Now Americans feared the exact reverse: that Chinese students had turned into vessels for Chinese values, tools for suppressing free speech, and conspirators in an international technology heist.

When ideology wasn’t an issue, economics was. Wealthy students had subsidized American universities reeling from budget cuts, but they also sparked a backlash from American students and professors who worried college admissions were being bought and sold on the free market. In 2018, the University of California system finally began implementing a policy to assuage those concerns: enrollment by non-California residents would be capped at 18 percent, or at the percentage in the 2017–18 year for schools in which it already exceeded that percentage.²² For now at least, California looks to have hit its peak for Chinese students.

Undergirding all these changes has been a tectonic shift in geopolitical balance: today’s Chinese students are coming from a country that is far more prosperous, powerful, and stable than at any point in recent history. It’s a change that affects their motivations to come, their decisions to leave, and their posture toward everything they encounter in America. This group doesn’t always feel the pull of American culture, and when they encounter liberal democracy up close, they’re not necessarily impressed.

International, national, and state politics are all at play here. But if you zoom in a little further, the experience of Chinese students in the U.S. is still intensely personal and can be, in its own way, liberating.

CONCLUSION: KAFKA IN SAN FRANCISCO

Groups of painfully shy Chinese students are milling around near the neon-lit red carpet. Tonight, the University of San Francisco is hosting the first-ever “Golden University Student Micro-Film Festival,” and the award nominees look equal parts excited and anxious. The event is put on by the local CSSA chapter, and ten teams of aspiring filmmakers from seven different California colleges are out here. Earlier in the year, I had created an online video series titled The California Spirit introducing California culture in Chinese. The first episode has been nominated for awards in a couple of categories—basically, serving as a token American project to increase the “international” flavor of the event.

The red carpet has been laid out in an alleyway behind the USF theater, splitting the difference between a chain-link fence and the back of the building. Neon-blue lights illuminate the way, and toward the end of the thirtyish yards of carpet, a camera crew waits to interview each nominee. We all take turns walking the carpet and answering a few stiff questions before heading into the school auditorium. I plop down in the center of the auditorium alongside a friend I’ve brought to the event, and we’re soon joined in the row by a handful of chatty Chinese guys dressed in ties and sweaters. They’re clearly enjoying themselves, and we strike up a conversation.

One of them is currently enrolled at San Francisco City College, and two of them recently graduated from UC Berkeley. One of the Berkeley grads, Wu Qiyin, now works in Google’s Cloud department and does creative writing on the side. He’s the scriptwriter behind their film: Kafka. I ask what it’s about.

“It’s about me!” the middle of the three blurts out. “My name is Kafka.”

We all have a laugh at how eager Kafka is to take center stage, and the author explains the film’s background. It’s not specifically about his friend, but it is about a gay Chinese student in America named Kafka, his struggle to make a genuine connection with those around him, and his difficulty in coming out to his family.

Kafka asks where I uploaded my own video: YouTube or on Chinese video sites? I tell them I put it on both and ask the same question to them.

“Just YouTube,” scriptwriter Wu tells me. “If we put it on Chinese sites, I think people would just criticize it—criticize us. We’ll just leave it up in the U.S. and that’s enough.”

Our hosts for the night step onto the stage, including the president of the USF CSSA, a skinny film lover who I had met earlier through Professor Stanley Kwong. He makes awkward banter with his cohost and invites a series of sponsors and esteemed guests to the stage, including a representative from the education department of the nearby Chinese consulate in San Francisco, who makes a few standard-issue remarks on the importance of educational and cultural exchanges.

Sitting there, it occurs to me that in a certain light, an event like tonight could be interpreted as another Chinese “influence operation.” It was put on by the CSSA, an increasingly politicized group. In attendance were multiple members of the Chinese Communist Party and representatives from the Chinese consulate. I imagine that any films touching on sensitive issues like the Dalai Lama or Taiwan would have been barred from competing; for all I know, that kind of censorship may have happened at USF that night.

And yet, that narrative doesn’t get to the heart of what’s happening here. The restrictions described above are real, but so are the new possibilities being explored by students through their films. As the auditorium goes dark, the screen lights up with short clips from each of the projects, small snatches of the stories that these students wanted to tell. One depicts the relationship between an old man and his granddaughter in a poor corner of rural China. Another follows a Chinese PhD student at Stanford who is haunted by paranoid fantasies and eventually saved by faith in God.

Kafka follows its title character from high school in China through college at Berkeley. It shows him getting bullied as a teenager in public by the same boy who is intimate with him in private, and then Kafka echoing that same behavior as a closeted college student. It shows him meeting David at a club in San Francisco’s Castro District, and the tentative first steps of their relationship. Woven throughout are surreal montages and a monologue reciting parts of astronomer Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot.

As the show progresses, awards are doled out and shy acceptance speeches delivered from the stage. My film comes up empty at the end of the night. The same goes for Kafka, despite nominations for best actor, best original screenplay, and best picture. It’s a disappointment for the Kafka crew, but not a major one. They made their movie and were happy to put it out there into the world. Back in the lobby, we all take a picture together and add each other on WeChat.

Kafka featured several shots of the Bay Bridge, and as I drive my car back over it toward Oakland, something Tim Lin said to me three years earlier keeps running through my head.

“When Chinese students go to American colleges, they immediately find out that life can go many different ways. Not a linear one, not a single way.”