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
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