Now, as I followed these stories up and down the state of California, I saw early glimpses of a country transformed. Chinese technology companies had become some of the largest in the world, and they were making their presence felt in Silicon Valley. The Chinese movie industry was growing at breakneck speed and casting a spell over executives in Hollywood. Chinese students, tourists, investors, and home buyers abroad were carving out a new reputation for their countrymen: rich, sometimes cultured, sometimes crass, and very ready to spend.
Watching as Chinese tourists lugging enormous cameras poured into Stanford’s Quad, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is this how Italians in 1950s Rome felt when all the Americans began crowding into the Colosseum?
This new wave of arrivals didn’t quite reflect the life of the average Chinese person back home: the country was still middle-income, with large swaths of the population scraping out a living in factories or on farms. And many Chinese immigrants arriving on U.S. soil did so in a low-key, thoughtful, and genuinely curious way: more in the tradition of James Baldwin in Paris than obnoxious Americans in Thailand. But China’s growing footprint in California does offer clues into the country’s future: the industries it wants to promote, the lifestyles it hopes to adopt, and the kind of wealth it hopes to cultivate.
THE BAY AREA, BEIJING, AND BACK AGAIN
After seven months in visa limbo, I was abruptly informed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that I would indeed receive a journalist visa. I tied up some loose ends with my reporting, packed my things, and in the late summer of 2014 headed back to Beijing.
But sitting in the airport departures lounge, I once again knew that I would be coming back—this time to California. China still felt like the center of the action, but the Transpacific Experiment felt like the next frontier.
Back in China with my newly minted journalist credentials, I pinballed around the country, covering everything from democracy protests in Hong Kong to down-and-out coal towns in Shaanxi Province. I also traced the transpacific stories back to their source, meeting the Chinese students who were heading to California and those who had returned, the artificial intelligence (AI) researchers who left Google to found their start-up back in China, and the wealthy “birth tourists” who gave birth to American citizens on U.S. soil before heading home to Beijing.
In 2016 I moved to Oakland, California, and since then I’ve continued weaving in more layers and more characters as these stories evolved. Tracing these trends from source to destination and back again continues to drive home the interconnectedness of these two places. In this world of deep China–U.S. entanglement, an anticorruption crackdown in Guangzhou can drive up housing prices in Pasadena, and an ideological campaign in Beijing can reshape the movie slate of Hollywood studios. We don’t know what long-term consequences these ties will yield, but it’s clear that they are already molding the industries, technologies, universities, and communities that affect the entire world.
Each of the following chapters charts these trends in one of six key arenas: education, technology, film, green investment, real estate, and American politics. Each chapter seeks to explore that arena through the eyes of the people who are living out these phenomena in real time: students, film producers, mayors, entrepreneurs, and community activists. Woven into those stories are my own intersections with them, the chances I’ve had to both observe and sometimes affect the Transpacific Experiment in action. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about both countries from watching this strange new world take shape, and I hope you will as well.
Let’s dive in.
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