Openness needed for 50,000 young Americans to China

■ To realise Xi Jinping’s vision, Beijing must create ‘an atmosphere that says to these young people you’re welcome here’, says talent retention expert David Zweig.

■ China still has a great need for global talent, according to CCG founder and president Wang Huiyao.

Beijing should create an atmosphere of openness if it wants to attract many more young Americans to the country, according to a veteran expert on China’s talent recruitment and retention efforts.

David Zweig, professor emeritus of the social science division at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said China’s plan to have 50,000 young Americans go to China over the next five years, was a “good goal” but also would be a “challenge”.

“It’s important that China creates an atmosphere that says to these young people you’re welcome here – to come, study and get a job – and that China is open for business to the foreign companies,” he said on Thursday during a seminar at the Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG), a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank.

Zweig said students, like him, who went to study in China before the country’s opening up to the outside world saw that “times were pretty tough” then and there had been great changes since that time.

“That whole group of people knows the changes that have happened and we support an open China. Our commitment is to an open China that engages with the world and our own governments engaging with China. That’s what we support.”

Addressing a dinner with US business leaders in San Francisco in November, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China was ready to invite 50,000 young Americans to China for exchanges and studies in the next five years.

It followed an agreement between the Chinese leader and his US counterpart Joe Biden to encourage the expansion of educational, student, youth, cultural, sports and business exchanges.

Before that, experts on both sides had warned that a years-long, pandemic-induced hiatus in such interactions had bred mutual misunderstanding, suspicion, blame and invective between the two powers.

Amid an economic slowdown and rising tensions with the West, there have been growing questions about whether China is losing its lustre as a favourable place for foreign students and investors.

The number of American students in China fell to just 350 last year from 15,000 “six or seven years ago”, although it doubled to 700 in 2023, Washington’s envoy to Beijing Nicolas Burns said at an event at the Brookings Institution earlier this month.

The number of Chinese studying in the US has also fallen, although much less dramatically and Chinese students continue to outnumber any other foreign group in the United States. During the 2022-23 school year, 289,526 Chinese studied in the US, down 0.2 per cent from the previous year and a third year in a row of declines – according to an annual US government-funded study by the Institute of International Education.

Zweig, who is now vice-president of CCG, said it was important that Xi called for China to attract more American students “but there also needs to be an effort on the Chinese side to say let’s have a dialogue about this”.

He added that China had not seen a rebound that it had hoped for in students from other parts of the world.

Wang Huiyao, founder and president of CCG, said it would be a challenge to meet the 50,000 US student target given the tense geopolitical situation.

But as the world’s second-largest economy, China still had a great need for global talent and Xi’s announcement sent a signal to local authorities, universities and companies across China to welcome American young people.

“If everybody is mobilised to work on the American counterparts, I think it could be not that difficult,” he said.

From SCMP， 2023-12-29