Experts involved in the analysis of the American education system note that China is reducing cooperation in this area not only with America, but also with European states. This causes serious concern among the authorities and the administration of educational institutions, because the influx of students from the Celestial Empire is a powerful factor in economic stability and sustainable rates of development of universities.
Resource dependency
With one and a half billion people, China is the main exporter of students, who are lustfully watched by higher educational institutions of many countries, seriously hoping to overcome the financial and economic crisis at their expense. And personnel – after all, the Chinese make up the lion's share of postdocs, our graduate students, who are staffed with research laboratories and invited as teaching assistants.
What if these places remain unplaced? Both the scientific component and the reputational component will suffer.
In the United States , students from China are at least a third of the total number of 1.2 million foreigners. In some other countries, which also actively import students, the situation is similar: in Australian universities , 38% are Chinese, and in British universities - 41%. This creates dependence on China, which becomes dangerous, or at least unhealthy, when the influx of Chinese students declines.
Ties are crumbling
Why is this flow declining? There are only two most significant reasons.
- Development of the higher education system in the PRC
In the Middle Kingdom, the number of its own higher educational institutions is growing, capable of competing on an equal footing with institutions from Europe, Japan and the United States. Now China itself imports students: half a million foreign citizens study here. First of all, these are other Asians, but there are exceptions.
- Political differences
No less important is the fact that relations between China and the United States are far from cloudless: the student flow is affected by commercial wars, mutual sanctions and duties. China has worked extremely elegantly in this regard, introducing sectoral measures against the products of precisely those states that supported Trump and the Republicans in the elections.
Beijing also reacts to other divertissements of Western countries. This affects the quantity and quality of cooperation at the academic level. Many once popular university partnership programs are close to closure, and the share of new graduate students is decreasing. Especially serious was the drop in the number of students in the midwestern states supporting Trump, where foreigners are generally not liked.
The government will limit opportunities for cooperation between universities in the future, resorting to propaganda tools. Or to the Jesuit tool already familiar to foreign students in the form of an advertisement as a foreign or enemy agent, the reduction of scholarship funds and other support programs.
The fight was equal, they fought...
However, one should not think that the position of one side is to blame. The West is also actively trying.
Americans have tightened the rules of work for visa-eligible Chinese working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has regained control of foreigners working on secret research projects, and Trump has bluntly called domestically working Chinese citizens spies.
Similar discourse is demonstrated in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. They talk in full swing about the risks of getting into the networks of the same intelligence of the PRC, and also actively dislike confucius Institutes. These are such centers for the popularization of Chinese culture, they operate at many US universities. But not so long ago, a dozen were closed, and the same threat hangs over the rest, they can at any time be declared a hostile foreign organization with all the ensuing consequences.
China is also tinkering. There is now a ball of ideology, it prevails over all others in academic life. The Internet did not become a window to the free world and did not open unlimited access to information, it only created new obstacles, filters and control mechanisms. The government is trying to censor the scientific journals available in the PRC, which is condemned by Western science, although the latter is forced to make concessions. A lot of noise was made by history when the University of Cambridge, which publishes the prestigious magazine China Quarterly, cleaned up from its website three hundred scientific publications that do not suit Chinese comrades for one reason or another.
True, the scandal in the Western scientific world forced the journal to return the articles to their previous place, but the reputation remained tarnished. Publishers are forced to comply with local laws and subject the content of their own publications to partial censorship - or block access from China, which negatively affects the academic reputation of the PRC.
But that's not all, as they said in the TV show "Shop on the Couch": academic ties tend to weaken also because this is the official line of the Academy itself.
We are pessimistic
The Chinese are making tremendous efforts to create a grid of world-class universities, which forces excellent students to choose them. It is also possible that after the school reform there will be a university reform, and the government will tighten the rules for opening branches of foreign higher educational institutions in the Middle Kingdom.
Do not blow the cup and research institutes, which are now advised to start collecting scoops.
