Chinese students abroad used to be seen as diligent, penny-pinching, and idealistic. But it's a whole new era.
Chinese students abroad used to be seen as diligent, penny-pinching, and idealistic. No longer.
Foreign Policy | 1 September 2015
When Lingjia Hu arrived in the United States from China in 1996, she
did so thanks to a scholarship that would allow her to pursue
post-doctorate training at the University of Colorado School of
Medicine. Raised by a family of doctors, Hu told Foreign Policy she wanted
to “save the country with science,” but there were no opportunities for
her back home. At Xiangya Hospital in Hu’s native city of Changsha, the
best medical institution in China at the time, the lights would
intermittently turn off because electricity was unreliable. When Hu
moved to Colorado, she did a homestay with an American family. It would
be six months before her first bite of Chinese food in the United
States, only after learning how to drive to the local take-out
restaurant. She then married, raised a son, and has lived in Denver ever
since.
China U. is an FP series devoted to higher education’s role as a major and growing node of connection between the world’s two powers. How will a new generation, fluent in China and in America, shape the future of bilateral ties?
Fast-forward to Boston in 2015, where Yikun Wang will soon enter his
senior year as an undergraduate at Northeastern University. Wang hails
from Anhui province, a historically impoverished region of China, but pays full tuition at the private school — which charges over $44,000 per year — and lives in a co-op with two other Chinese students. Wang
said he often sees young Chinese peers cutting class, driving luxury
cars, and going into the city for extravagant weekend shopping trips. He
is an economics and finance major, and hopes to pursue a career in
investment banking. While he thinks that he may stay and work in the
United States after graduation, he is an anomaly: For many of his peers,
the American higher education experience, Wang said, is a bit like a
four-year vacation.
In less than two decades, the image of Chinese students studying in
the United States has transformed drastically. While Hu and Wang are
just two of the hundreds of thousands
of Chinese students who have made the trans-Pacific journey, they
embody the archetypes of each generation. The Chinese students who
arrived in the early 1980s — when then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping
first announced his “open door” policy, which allowed Chinese scholars and students to study in the United States after decades of national isolation —
represented some of the nation’s best and brightest. Funded by
international scholarships and money from Beijing, they sought to escape
poverty and instability for a land of opportunity. The majority wanted
to stay in the United States, where they could get a green card, land a
job, and integrate themselves into American society. They were, in other
words, pursuing the American dream.
But for many Chinese studying in the United
States in 2015, time spent stateside is but a steppingstone to a Chinese
dream — one that’s for sale. Thanks to the immense purchasing
power of the growing Chinese middle class, the image of the humble and
diligent Chinese student of the 1980s has been replaced by that of the
entitled fu’erdai, or the second-generation scion in a wealthy
family, who studies abroad in order to return home to run the family
business. The fu’erdai pay full tuition, often study finance, business
management, or economics, and spend their time clustered together. At
the University of California Los Angeles, rising senior Jing Li said that many Chinese students have “formed a sub campus,” capable of living a life apart from their classmates.
Their relative isolation isn’t hard to understand, given that Chinese
students are part of a massive influx that dwarfs anything that has
come before. When Erhfei Liu entered Brandeis University, a private
research university in Massachusetts, as a sophomore in 1981, he was the
second Chinese student the university had ever admitted; his
Chinese-ness was simply an interesting addition of diversity to the
student body. “I was a rare animal from Red China,” said Liu, “an alien
from the moon.” (Liu ended up pursuing a career in finance, a rarity
among Chinese graduates in his time.) By contrast, in the 2014-2015
academic year, there were 423 graduate and 248 undergraduate
Chinese-born students studying at Brandeis. It’s just as crowded in
America’s heartland. As of 2014, there were over 2,800 Chinese students studying in Colorado and even more in Illinois. “Walk around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign” — which enrolled
nearly 5,000 Chinese students last year — “and it will feel like you’re
walking around the busiest shopping district in Shanghai,” said Mark
Montgomery, founder of American Academic Advisors, a consultancy based
in Hong Kong that works with Chinese students.
The generation gap goes deeper than sheer numbers, to the very root
of China’s recent transformation from economic basket case to global
titan. “We came penniless. We didn’t go out to
dinner, didn’t go to parties, and assumed that American students were
all really rich,” said Brandeis graduate Liu, looking back
on his undergraduate days in the 1980s. “At the time, the U.S. minimum
wage seemed astronomically high to us,” he explained. “A friend of mine
was the daughter of one of the top ten most powerful officials in China
and yet, in America, she worked three years as a part-time house maid to
pay for her student loans.” The year that Liu graduated, according to the World Bank, China’s per capita GDP was $249 per year.
China’s per capita GDP now exceeds
$7,593 per year, more than 30 times the 1984 tally. The country’s
breathtakingly rapid economic growth has minted dozens of billionaires
and lifted hundreds of millions into a burgeoning middle class, whose
members can often afford to send their children abroad and even pay full
college tuition. It’s showing. Upscale department stores Bergdorf
Goodman and Bloomingdale’s have sponsored events aimed specifically at
wooing the pocketbooks of Chinese students, the former sponsoring Chinese
New Year celebrations in January 2014 at New York University and
Columbia University — where Chinese students number in the thousands —
and the latter holding a fashion show for Chinese students in Chicago in November 2014.
As these anecdotes might suggest, on-campus Chinese are often richer
than their American classmates. Jing, the UCLA senior, told FP
that the disparity is particularly stark at public universities like
hers: Tuition fees for international students are far higher than for
Californians, and the cost of living in the Beverly Hills area is
particularly demanding. “My Californian friends were shocked when I told
them how much I have to pay [to study at UCLA],” Jing said.
It’s not just a thickening wallet that separates yesterday’s overseas
Chinese student from today’s. Many have noted a shift in the academic
goals and underlying motivations pulling Chinese scholars stateside. A
common observation among the Chinese interviewed for this article is
that the students of the previous generation were more idealistic and
patriotic. Danchi Wang, a graduate of Wellesley College’s class of 1989
(no relation to Yikun Wang), said she pursued education in America
because she “wanted to improve [herself], so that [she] could contribute
to the modernization of China.” Wang recalled wanting to be “the
Chinese Madame Curie,” an aspiration she said many of her peers shared.
Chinese students studying abroad today aren’t generally looking to cure cancer or serve their homeland. According to Danchi Wang, many young Chinese come to the United States to make themselves more marketable, a goal reflected in the growing proportion of Chinese
students who are choosing to study business, finance, or management.
For Zhao Yong, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry, “there
are really only two paths for a Chinese graduate in the United States:
Go into finance or join a large IT firm.” Zhao said this jokingly, and
although he himself took neither path, his words appear to ring true.
When people ask Yikun Wang what he is studying at Northeastern, they
often give him a choice of one of two answers: finance or economics.
(Wang studies both.) “They’d be totally surprised if you tell them
you’re majoring in art,” he said.
Parents are often equally, if not more invested in the pragmatic
value and marketability of their children’s education. Jiang Xueqin,
educator and author of Creative China, a book published in China about the country’s education system, explained in an August 2014 interview with the Huffington Post that
parents in China want to “hedge their bets and diversify their assets” —
and a child overseas makes a “good pretext for capital flight.” Paying
for an American education is also a way to elevate a family’s social
status. “Having a child attend an overseas school is now seen as the
equivalent of driving a BMW and carrying an [Louis Vuitton] handbag in
China,” said Jiang. Montgomery said that he has clients that pull children out of the Chinese college entrance exam, or gaokao,
prep stream as early as preschool and place them into the international
division of select schools to chart their path to higher education
abroad. Forums on massive Chinese mobile chat platform WeChat and online
microblogging websites are now peppered with stories of grandparents pooling their resources to send their grandchild to college. A recent article on microblogging platform Weibo featured an interview with a
taxi driver from the central province of Henan, who sold his house and
plowed all of his annual $12,885 salary into sending his son abroad.
Montgomery said many Chinese parents send children abroad “to see how
quickly they can get into Goldman Sachs,” an investment bank.
Not everyone is happy with the influx of Chinese students flowing
into U.S. higher education. At Michigan State University, vandals spray-painted the words “go back home” on a Chinese student’s car. At UCLA in 2011, an undergraduate student posted an anti-Asian video rant,
where she mocked people speaking an Asian language and said, “The
problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our
school every single year.” Some of the
criticism of Chinese students appears to stem, at least in part, from
anxiety over an increasingly fraught U.S.-China relationship. At Kansas State University, a student newspaper published a
column (later appended with an apology) in response to the rising
numbers of international students — Chinese students, in particular —
attending the school. The piece went so far as to argue that U.S. tax
dollars should not be used to fund the education of “citizens from
Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq or Turkey … students who could, in the
near future, become the enemy.”
Montgomery invited critics to put the shoe on the other foot and imagine they were preparing to send their children to China. “Maybe
you’ve been to Beijing or Shanghai, maybe you have one Chinese friend,
maybe you’ve eaten some General Tso’s Chicken,” he said. “Now you’re
sending your kid to China — how are you going to do that? Who are you
going to talk to? You’re going to look at the rankings, you’re going to
pay whatever it takes to trust somebody who will help your kid out, and
when he’s there, your kid is going to hang out with other Americans.”
Much of the criticism also fails to consider that many Chinese
students are engaged in pathbreaking, self-expressive pursuits that many
young Americans would find familiar. Yong, the Yale Forestry graduate
student, for example, eschewed finance and IT and instead partnered with
the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute to create Junzi Kitchen,
a restaurant serving Chinese food in a Chipotle-style service line. Min
Yang, a health policy major at UNC Chapel Hill from the southern
province of Guangdong, who wants to pursue a career in healthcare,
studied approaches to increase HIV testing uptake in South China and
designed health and science classes for Tibetan children in Yunnan
province as part of his work with the NGO Machik.
And Cathy Jiang, a 27-year-old marketing analyst turned producer and a
graduate of Fordham University’s MBA program, has tried to challenge the
stereotype of the wealthy and entitled overseas Chinese student by
producing short films. One of her films, Study Abroad, focuses on
the day-to-day challenges Chinese students face in the United
States, from making new friends, to having the courage to speak up in
seminars, to pursuing one’s passions and shaking off sometimes onerous
parental expectations. The sequel, The Daydreaming Bunny,
chronicles the life of an art student who tries to earn money for her
graduation exhibition and prove to her conservative family that her
paintings have a purpose.
The previous generation of Chinese students in America was no doubt
different from today’s crop, a fact Jiang acknowledges. “Sure, they had
more difficulties paying tuition, taking on student jobs, and dealing
with student loans,” said Jiang. But she added, “Just because we are
different does not mean we don’t have our own unique set of challenges
to overcome.” And among the Chinese students pouring into the United
States every year, there will be countless students like her who will
tackle these obstacles in innovative ways their predecessors could never
have envisioned.
Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images
Correction, Sept. 1: Over 2,800 Chinese students studied at Colorado in 2014; this article originally stated 2,880 students studied there. Erhfei
Liu enrolled in Brandeis as a sophomore in 1981, not 1984. 423 graduate
and 248 undergraduate Chinese-born students studied at Brandeis in the
2014-2015 academic year, not 250 and 200.
No comments:
Post a Comment