Keywords

People-to-People (P2P) ties between the United States and People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) were already rocky prior to the emergence of COVID-19. The spike in bilateral tensions, both because of and coinciding with the pandemic, combined with China’s isolation under its “Zero COVID” policy to create a nearly impenetrable barrier between the countries.

Today, public health risks have largely abated, but political risks have not. People in the United States and China are seeking ways to reinvigorate ties while mitigating concerns about vulnerabilities when citizens from each country visit the other.

P2P ties encompass a broad range of activities from cultural exchanges to sporting events, such as the pivotal “ping-pong diplomacy” of the early 1970s (National Committee on United States-China Relations). This chapter addresses connections in the academic realm, focused on the physical movement of students and academics (i.e., professors and other people engaged in scholarly research) between the United States and China.

Academic P2P connections are distinct from what the U.S. State Department describes as “people-to-people diplomacy” (or simply “people’s diplomacy”): “[W]hen diplomats meet directly with the citizens of their host country, rather than just with official representatives” (National Museum of American Diplomacy). The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace provides a more expansive description of “people-to-people diplomacy” as when “people from all parts of society are encouraged to act as individuals or as group bridge builders across historical, cultural, and political divides” (Yamen 2010).

The point here is to assess where we stand at the start of 2024 regarding the movement between the United States and China of students and academics—not how diplomats are reaching beyond official channels to connect directly with the citizenry of foreign countries. Government support is important for academic ties, as demonstrated by the Fulbright Program that around the world “has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns” (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs). The actors of concern here, however, are non-governmental members of academia who are reaching across the Pacific Ocean.

This chapter sets the backdrop of academic relations prior to the pandemic. It next addresses the period from the pandemic’s outbreak to China’s end of its “Zero COVID” policy in late 2022. Finally, it examines efforts to rekindle academic connections despite the risks involved and, as with other chapters in this volume, offers a few policy recommendations for both governments.

Pre-pandemic Ties

Debates rage today whether, and if so to what extent, a heavily intertwined PRC and United States should move toward “decoupling.” In the early days of the PRC, the United States and the PRC were quite simply uncoupled. While a handful of Americans lived in the PRC following its establishment in 1949 (Rittenberg and Bennett 2001), for decades the two countries were almost entirely disconnected with the bonds maintained by the diasporic community in the United States with heritage ties to China being a rare force that prevented a complete cleavage. Students and professors from China who were in the United States at the founding of the PRC found themselves in a fraught situation. Eric Fish writes, “Regardless of their political sympathies, the day China became communist was the day that all of its students abroad did as well, in many American eyes” (Fish 2020).

Academic connections were halted through the 1960s. Then a law professor at the University of California Berkeley, Jerome A. Cohen recalled his writing in the 1960s of “letters to both Chairman Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in the hope they might make an exception and invite me to Beijing” (Cohen 2017). President Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972 marked a dramatic turn in U.S.-China relations and paved the way for academic access: “Three months [after Nixon’s February 1972 visit], thanks to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, several colleagues, including my wife Joan Lebold Cohen—a student of Chinese art—and I spent a month in China.”

Jerry Cohen was far from the only American who was eager to visit China. Funders like the Ford Foundation had already invested heavily in Chinese studies within the United States:

The Foundation’s involvement with China began in the early 1950s with efforts to develop Chinese studies in American universities. Our purpose was to increase understanding of China. We reasoned that a nation accounting for almost one-quarter of humankind could not be ignored by an institution that had as its goals the advancement of human welfare and the establishment of world peace. During the 1950s and 1960s, Foundation support for Chinese studies totaled more than $30 million, mostly in the United States but also in Europe, India, and Japan. (Ford Foundation 1988)

The opening to visitors in the 1970s meant a shift from the remote study of China to an approach that included routinized visits. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China was founded in the 1960s but only gained momentum after Nixon’s visit. In 1986, the Committee opened a Beijing office under the sponsorship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to “facilitate[] programs to help coordinate placement of students and scholars in China” (Berkshire Press 2009).

The 1980s brought a deepening of academic ties with, for example, Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University in 1986 welcoming an inaugural class of sixty students from China and abroad to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (Hopkins-Nanjing Center). To this day, this unique immersive environment houses Chinese and foreign students together as the Chinese students take classes in English from foreign (largely American) professors and the foreign (again, largely American) students are taught in Chinese by Chinese professors.

The flow of Americans to China largely paused following June 4, 1989, but some programs like the Hopkins-Nanjing Center continued: “After the Tiananmen massacre, the United States imposed limited sanctions on China—such as suspending arms sales—but President Bush said he wanted to safeguard the educational and cultural exchanges that had been established. ‘The Hopkins program is just the kind of thing the president had in mind,’ a State Department official said” (Baltimore Sun 1989). In the United States, the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 created a path for over 54,000 PRC-national students to obtain permanent residency (Zhang 2021).

Academic ties grew rapidly in the 1990s with the establishment of new programs like Princeton-in-Beijing that began with 87 students in 1993 (Princeton University 2021) and a general shift of Chinese language learning from Taiwan to China, as seen in the 1997 move of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies from Taipei to Tsinghua University in Beijing (Inter-University Program). On the flip side, by 2001 there were more than 63,000 Chinese students in the United States (Fish 2020).

The number of Chinese students in the United States far exceeded the reverse. In 2009, however, President Obama announced the “100,000 Strong” initiative to increase the number of Americans studying in China (U.S. Department of State 2009). The Obama administration followed this in 2015 with the “1 Million Strong” initiative that aimed to bring the total number of students learning Mandarin Chinese in the United States to one million by 2020 (Allen-Ebrahimian 2015). Neither of these initiatives hit their targets, and both were abandoned. In the 2019–2020 academic year, only 2,481 U.S. students studied in China (USA Study Abroad). In contrast, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States grew from approximately 60,000 in 2000 to a high of 372,532 in the 2019–2020 academic year, though two decades of rapid growth was leveling off (Silver 2021).

While far short of the Obama administration’s ambitious goals, the decade before the pandemic did see the creation of large-scale joint academic institutions in China that included both Chinese and foreign students, such as the degree-granting entities of NYU Shanghai in 2012 by New York University and East China Normal University (NYU Shanghai) and Duke Kunshan in 2013 by Duke University and Wuhan University (Duke Kunshan). In 2016, the Rhodes-Scholarship-inspired Schwarzman Scholars program housed at Tsinghua University welcomed an inaugural class of 111 scholars “composed of students from 32 countries and 75 universities with 44% from the United States, 21% from China, and 35% from the rest of the world” (Schwarzman Scholars 2016).

Yet the years leading up to the pandemic also brought increasing concerns about a tightening political atmosphere in China, as epitomized by the 2016 PRC Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Nongovernmental Organizations in Mainland China (ChinaFile 2017). The Law sharply limited activities of foreign NGOs and signaled a broader trend in the Chinese government’s efforts to limit international engagement that it viewed as problematic (Kellogg 2020). I recall the last U.S.-China Legal Experts Dialogue in October 2015 (U.S. Department of State 2015), at which the then draft law was a focus of the American side’s concerns. It was clear that the Chinese government was reining in not only NGOs but also domestic and foreign academics who engaged with civil society. This was a sharp departure from the prior comparatively open atmosphere for collaboration, for instance, among academics, lawyers, human rights advocates, and judges on sensitive issues like the death penalty (Lewis 2011). In 2016, the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative, which worked on the death penalty and a host of other legal issues, closed its Beijing office (Weiss 2017).

A 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report addressed concerns about the space for academic freedom at China-sited entities, finding that members of these entities “generally indicated that they experienced academic freedom” but flagging internet censorship and other concerns: “Administrators, faculty, and students also cited examples of self-censorship, where certain sensitive political topics—such as Tiananmen Square or China's relationship with Taiwan—were avoided in class, and of constraints faced by Chinese students in particular” (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2016).

In 2017, the Asia Society hosted a conversation on these issues (Asia Society 2017a). Orville Schell, director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, reflected on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) intensifying ideological oversight: “I think if you look back and compare it to the 80s, even to the 90s after 1989 as China slowly began to open up again and to liberalize in many ways, you would have to say there has been a chill and the fact that it has extended even to universities and academic exchanges, which were once considered sort of free and clear is I think very regrettable and worth noting” (Asia Society 2017b).

Greater scrutiny of the space for American-sponsored academic entities in China was paired with intense attention to Chinese-sponsored ones in the United States. A 2023 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report detailed how the more than 100 Confucius Institutes—Chinese government-funded language and culture centers—on American campuses in the late 2000s and 2010s had dwindled to only seven Confucius Institutes (National Academies 2023). Broader political pressure combined with congressional action that barred institutions receiving Department of Defense (DOD) critical language flagship funding for Chinese from hosting a Confucius Institute: “While this provision allowed for a waiver process—and several affected colleges and universities applied for waivers in 2018 and 2019—DOD did not issue any waivers” (National Academies 2023).

The pandemic also coincided with the U.S. government’s increased focus on individual academics with ties to China. The 2019 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) publication titled, “China: The Risk to Academia,” recognized the value of foreign students and professors but warned that the United States’ open academic environment “also puts academia at risk for exploitation by foreign actors who do not follow our rules or share our values,” and that “the Chinese government uses some Chinese students—mostly post-graduate students and post-doctorate researchers studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—and professors to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property” (FBI 2019).

The U.S. Department of Justice’s “China Initiative,” in effect from 2018 to 2022, used criminal charges to protect a broad definition of national security, with a focus on preventing intellectual property from being siphoned off to entities linked to the PRC government (Lewis 2020a). That many of the people charged under the Initiative were of Chinese descent—including the high-profile case of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Gang Chen that the government abandoned when the investigation failed to show any crimes (Barry and Benner 2022)—created a chilling effect that did not end with the Initiative’s retirement (Xie et al. 2022).

The Beijing-directed erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong in the lead-up to the pandemic exacerbated concerns about academic connections with China. In July 2020, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. government would end the Fulbright exchange program with both mainland China and Hong Kong (White House 2020). And, while not ascribed to political reasons, in January 2020, the Peace Corps ended its China program (Schmitz 2020), with the remaining 139 Peace Corps China volunteers evacuated by early February due to the pandemic (Peace Corps 2020). This evacuation was but one facet of the scramble to assist Americans to leave China in the early days of COVID-19 (Jordan and Bosman 2020).

Pandemic-Era Ties

The pandemic’s onset brought the flow of people between the United States and China to a screeching halt. This left Chinese students in the United States questioning whether to stay. If they sought to return to China, they faced the formidable challenges of a dearth of flights combined with the time, cost, and stress of entry testing and quarantine procedures.

Students in China who had been accepted into American universities for the 2020–2021 academic year had to navigate whether they could, and should, physically enter the United States, as well as whether any portion of their academic program would be in person even if they made it to campus. In July 2020, the U.S. government announced that foreign students would not be allowed entry if they were only taking online courses (Svrluga 2020). After a period of uncertainty (Rauhala 2020), foreign students already in the United States were, however, allowed to stay even if taking more online courses than federal law permitted before the pandemic (Lederman 2022).

Not only did the vastly higher COVID-19 infection numbers in the United States present health risks compared to the relative safety of China’s quickly implemented “Zero Covid” policy, people of Chinese heritage in the United States also faced a sharp rise in discrimination and even hate crimes. Data on hate crimes is difficult to gather and analyze. With that caution, one study found that “hate crime against Asian Americans temporarily surged after March 16, 2020, when the blaming labels including ‘Kung flu’ or ‘Chinese Virus’ were used publicly. However, the significant spike after March 16, 2020, in anti-Asian American hate crime was not sustained over the follow-up time period available for analysis” (Han et al. 2023).

In a 2022 report—issued a year following enactment of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act—the U.S. government recognized the lack of data and the challenge of underreporting both by law enforcement agencies and victims. Nonetheless, even with those limitations, it reported, “Hate crimes in the United States rose in 2020 to the highest level in 12 years, with a significant increase in numbers of anti-Asian and anti-Black hate crimes” (U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2022). According to an April 2023 report by Columbia University and the Committee of 100 based on a poll of 6,481 respondents over the age of 18 who self-identified as a person of Chinese ethnic origin who lived in the United States:

Nearly three out of four Chinese Americans experienced racial discrimination in the past 12 months, with two in three staying vigilant due to worries about safety related to hate crimes or harassment, nearly half reporting being treated with less respect than other people, and over a quarter experiencing bias or hate incidents such as being physically intimidated or assaulted, having their property vandalized or damaged, and being called names or [called] racial slurs. (Gao et al. 2023)

With all these dynamics in play, the number of Chinese students in the United States dropped to 317,299 in the 2020–2021 academic year (Silver 2021). Across the Pacific, the numbers plummeted: there were only 382 American university students in China for the 2020–2021 academic year (Xie 2022). American students were evacuated at the pandemic’s outset and programs pivoted to online learning (Hopkins-Nanjing 2020). Three evacuated American students wrote in September 2021 of their frustration when trying to return to China: “[F]or foreign students like us looking to return to China, critical X1/X2 student visas have all but disappeared. Despite [Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying’s] objections [to the U.S.’s denial of over 500 Chinese applicants’ student visas], this lack of reciprocity is the true barrier to people-to-people exchange” (McAndrews et al. 2021).

It was also nearly impossible for non-PRC-citizen academics to visit China, though a handful found channels. For example, Silvia Lindtner, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, was able to enter China as a visiting scholar at NYU Shanghai (Wang and Lindtner 2022). Scott Kennedy—a senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and former professor at Indiana University—teamed up with Wang Jisi—founding president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies and Boya Chair Professor Emeritus at Peking University—to find mutual pathways for visits in China and the United States (Kennedy and Wang 2023). Most academics, however, were limited to remote connections, with some like the U.S.-China Dialogue series open for public viewing (US-China Dialogue).

In 2022 as life in the United States moved from a pandemic mindset to existence with COVID-19 as endemic, people in China remained under tight restrictions. An October 2022 press release by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing encouraged that the “United States Welcomes Chinese Students” as part of a four-city China Education Expo, noting that “since May of last year the United States has issued well over 155,000 visas to Chinese students and scholars” (U.S. Embassy 2022). Looking at flows from the United States to China, however, Ambassador Nicholas Burns told POLITICO in April 2023:

Students are part of the ballast of this relationship. As recently as 10 years ago, there were 14,000–15,000 American students in China on an annual basis. There are now only about 350 American students in China. And that’s because of Covid—student visas were not available to American students. A lot of the university exchange programs had to shut down for these last three years. We don’t have the people-to-people connections right now that we’ve had in the past. (Kine 2023)

Post-pandemic Ties

China’s “Zero COVID” policy came under increasing strain in late 2022 due to economic repercussions and broad societal discontent with the draconian enforcement measures (Wong 2022). In early December, the government announced a sudden and dramatic relaxation (Che et al. 2022). China resumed issuance of all types of visas in March 2023 (Cash and Yu 2023).

That China and the United States are now both issuing visas does not, however, mean a resurgence in academic connections. The health risks have abated, but other risks remain. For Chinese students and academics considering time in the United States, common reasons cited for hesitation include “gun violence, rising anti-Asian racism, rocky U.S.-China relations, a slowing Chinese economy, higher global rankings for Chinese universities, and friendlier immigration policies in many other countries” (Chen 2023).

For American students and academics considering time in China, programs have only begun to reopen and, even if opportunities to visit China unexpectedly rebound, there are questions about demand (ChinaFile 2021). Chinese language learning in American universities has declined since a 2013 peak (USC 2021). As a point of optimism, although a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) survey on the status of Chinese studies in the United States found that “[i]nstitutional support for China research and education is perceived by all respondents to have declined in recent years; external funding, in particular, has been reduced[,]” the survey also uncovered that “[i]nterest in China studies remains strong. Despite recent political tension and a reported decline in the number of students learning the Chinese language on campuses, both undergraduate and graduate course offerings on China increased in number over the past five years” (ACLS 2021).

Underneath these general trends are complicated personal decisions about the risks and rewards of investing in studying the other country, including whether to spend time there. For some Americans the travel question has been decided for them because the PRC government’s refusal to issue a visa is clearly linked to the government’s disapproval of the applicant’s research (Wong 2011). In the reverse, for example, visa denials for some Chinese are because the U.S. government considers problematic their affiliation with academic institutions seen as supporting China’s “military-civil fusion strategy” (Anderson 2023).

For those who can obtain visas—and have the funds for airfares that remain above pre-pandemic levels—there are questions about bidirectional risk. Incidents known to this author of lengthy questioning of American academics upon arrival in China in the early period after borders opened (and at least one entry denial) raise concerns about what comfort a visa provides. Moreover, although neither was an academic or American, wariness about arbitrary detention remains following the nearly three-year detention and criminal trials of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig—without even basic procedural protections for the accused—in what was widely viewed outside China as retaliation for Canada’s detaining of PRC-citizen Meng Wanzhou (Paas-Lang 2021).

In addition to the risk of wrongful detention, the U.S. State Department warned in a March 2023 travel advisory of China’s use of exit bans (U.S. State Department 2023). At the time of writing in early 2024, the U.S. State Department website continued to caution, “Reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions” (U.S. State Department 2024). In late 2022, “John Kamm, who chairs the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, estimate[d] as many as 30 U.S. citizens are unable to leave China due to exit bans, on top of up to 200 detained in the country on what Dui Hua calls arbitrary grounds” (Areddy and Spegele 2022). The probability that an American academic with a valid PRC visa will be denied entry, detained after entry, or denied exit after entry are very low, but the personal cost if any of these actions occur can be very high.

For U.S.-based academics who visit China, echoes of the China Initiative have also been present upon their return to the United States. Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF) issued a press release in February 2023 “raising concerns after hearing about multiple incidents of Chinese American scientists, academics, and scholars being harassed or interrogated at ports of entry” (AASF 2023). While numbers are not available, anecdotal reports circulating in academic circles underscore that these concerns also apply to PRC-citizen scientists, academics, and scholars. Once inside the United States, Wang Jisi expressed wariness regarding personal safety both of general violent crime in the United States and of incidents targeted at people of Chinese descent, though he thankfully reported not experiencing any threats during his stay (Kennedy and Wang 2023). Lack of data makes it impossible to estimate risks accurately and, even if risks are generally quantifiable, the many factors that impact individual risk make decisions to travel between the United States and China intensively personal.

What then shall be done? In their April 2023 joint report, Kennedy and Wang call for the United States and China “to commit as a foundational policy to restoring direct connections across the entire span of the two societies” (Kennedy and Wang 2023). Their fifth and final recommendation directly addresses academia:

Both governments should commit to the full resumption of in-person scholarly ties, including students, university professors and administrators, think tank experts, scholarly publication editors, and foundation leaders. Many of these steps can be taken immediately or within a few months. At the same time, the two governments should create a Track 1.5 dialogue, involving both government officials and representatives of their respective scholarly communities, to discuss several elements of scholarly engagement. Potential issues include: (1) expanding opportunities for study abroad programs and language training; (2) fostering the integrity of transnational research, including the funding of research, collection of data, protection of intellectual property, and review process of scholarly publications; (3) strengthening norms related to field research and access to written materials, including archives; and (4) ensuring the safety and legal protections of members of the scholarly community when traveling between the two countries.

These would all be welcome steps. Indeed, Kennedy and Wang went on to organize a July 2023 meeting in Beijing with Chinese and American academics as the next stage in their project (Institute of International and Strategic Studies 2023). Reviving the Fulbright program with mainland China and Hong Kong would be a clear way to kickstart the first issue, even if the program returns in a limited and cautious form. Most pressing, however, is to address the fourth issue, upon which all the others depend: any of the ties that require in-person experiences in the other country hinge on addressing personal safety as well as the legal protections when a country takes actions against an individual deemed to be a threat to the country’s security. There is no way to fully immunize against the risks of in-person connectivity other than to stop it. There are, however, steps that can mitigate risk short of adopting a “Zero Travel” policy.

While in San Francisco for APEC in November 2023, Xi Jinping announced, “China is ready to invite 50,000 young Americans to China on exchange and study programs in the next five years to increase exchanges between the two peoples, especially between the youth” (Xinhua 2023). On the flip side, in December 2023, Ambassador Burns encouraged, “Chinese are the largest foreign student group at our universities. They’re welcome in this country… 292,000 students here now. We’ve just issued 94,000 student visas over the last five months for a new batch of students to come, and so the door is relatively open but not completely” (Council on Foreign Relations 2023). Such statements at the highest levels supporting exchanges are a necessary but insufficient step.

To truly build confidence for academic exchanges, especially beyond “study abroad” programs, both the U.S. and PRC governments should vocally and repeatedly provide assurances that, if an academic has complied with all visa-application procedures (e.g., full disclosure of the conference, guest teaching, research, or other activities) and remains within those parameters, they will not be interfered with upon entry or during their stay. The entire governmental structures in both countries then need to back this up to give the assurances credibility. That the visa-issuing entities in each country are distinct from (and not always having fully aligned interests with) the entities tasked with law enforcement and national security creates uncertainty about how much comfort a visa provides for an issue-free visit. Writing at the beginning of 2024, the modest yet increasingly regular bidirectional flow of academics is providing some reassurance that routinized exchange is possible. The concern that geopolitical tensions could flair and have externalities on academics, however, remains a dark cloud.

Moreover, China should increase transparency of legal proceedings involving foreign nationals because the denial of basic consular oversight in violation of unambiguous agreements with other countries has severely undermined confidence that foreign nationals who are pulled into the security system will receive even minimal protections (Clarke 2021; Reed 2022). In the United States, although the criminal process is vastly more transparent, the U.S. government still has tremendous power to search and question people—especially when entering the country (ACLU)—and to restrict access to information, especially when national security is at issue. Working in collaboration with organizations like the ACLU and AASF that have expressed well-founded concerns about government overreach can help shape fairer and more effective procedures, as well as demonstrate to the world that the United States takes seriously the values in its Constitution and of fundamental international human rights.

In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is clarifying and streamlining research security requirements (OSTP 2023). This is a crucial piece in a broader push to delineate legitimate national security concerns, define conflicts of commitment, and more generally provide students and academics with a clearer understanding of what kinds of connections with China could lead to administrative or criminal penalties. Parallel efforts by the Chinese government would be welcome as a way for China-based students and academics to likewise have more explicit guidance regarding what kind of ties with the United States will not trigger negative repercussions on their careers, or worse. It would be surprising indeed if the Chinese government provided such clarity, but signals short of direct statements are a step in the right direction.

In addition to spelling out the zone of permitted connections, academics need to not be overburdened with cumbersome and time-consuming compliance procedures that stifle even allowed activities. This is an acute issue in China. An Executive Dean at Renmin University, Wang Wen, advised in a May 2023 speech on attracting global talent that China should transition from a pre-approval system for intellectual exchanges to a post-reporting one because the former impedes academic exchanges (Liu et al. 2023).

Even with enhanced guidance on the permitted zone of activities, there will be times when academics—or their academic institution’s general counsel’s office—will have questions about what side of the line a contemplated activity falls. One possibility for addressing these gray-zone proposals is to create a process akin to the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s “no-action letters” (SEC) whereby researchers involved in areas that raise concerns about potential legal violations (e.g., regarding export control laws, which have serious criminal penalties) could get comfort from the government prior to engaging in travel or other activities with China-based partners. Specifically, the letter could document that, so long as the requesting person remains within their described project scope, the government would not recommend that enforcement actions be taken against the requester based on the facts and representations described in the submission. The current self-assessment of compliance creates risk for the individual and academic institution and, thus, could lean toward over-compliance that limits valuable interactions abroad.

Beyond enhancing clarity on allowed activities and compliance procedures, people getting on planes need guidance regarding how to conduct themselves when in the foreign country. Pre-departure briefings should include regularly updated information on best practices for protecting personal and proprietary information in line with the laws of the visited country, as well as how to mitigate safety concerns. It should also be developed with experts on interventions to reduce prejudice and discrimination so that materials do not fuel negative views of people based on their national origin, heritage, or ethnicity. The more that the government not only listens to but also actively involves impacted communities—ranging from Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocacy groups to professional associations of academics in STEM fields—the greater the hope of formulating policies that effectively address security threats while creating an atmosphere that welcomes valuable collaboration across borders.

The Cost of Lost Ties

In spring 2023, the WHO determined that “COVID-19 is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern” (World Health Organization 2023). U.S.-China P2P relations are likewise now an established and ongoing health issue: not to physical health, but rather to that of the bilateral relationship. The blow to the relationship’s health has already been costly. This is not to say that connections should have no bounds. Some costs are worthwhile to protect other interests. As noted above, research security requirements are needed to safeguard national security, but they should be delineated thoughtfully and with robust participation of various stakeholders.

Some costs of lost ties are fairly easily quantifiable, such as the direct hit to American universities measured by reduced tuition dollars due to a drop in the number of Chinese students. Yet much of what is lost is intangible and with costs likely to be felt far into the future as prior connections are prone to wither without ongoing maintenance and new ties are only being sparsely forged. This portends fewer insights into each other’s countries—insights that have long fed into policymaking channels. In a January 2024 piece, Rory Truex, a political science professor at Princeton University, reflected on his extensive time in China as compared with the situation today: “At a time of heightened competition with Beijing, our education system is not generating enough American citizens with Chinese language ability, meaningful lived experiences in China and deep area knowledge.” He wisely concluded, “In this moment of U.S.-China competition, we must do more than invest in weapons and semiconductors. We must invest in understanding” (Truex 2024).

Diminished ties can also deplete empathy, which as Professor Alex Wang points out, “This is particularly true these days, as the field of China analysis increasingly includes people with less direct experience with China, and as global views of China turn increasingly negative” (Wang 2023). He is quick to clarify his use of “empathy” not as suggesting “bias and the absence of empathy for objectivity” but rather as “openness to the idea that someone else’s reality might be configured in way that is different from your own but still legitimate. An empathetic orientation does not preclude critique” (Wang 2023).

Indeed, I have spent much of my career critiquing China’s human rights record (Lewis 2020b). My time in China, including extensive ties with academics there, has been critical for enriching my understanding of not only the human rights situation in China as a descriptive matter but also analytically why the party-state has made certain choices, and why those choices have elicited various responses from the citizenry. While heeding the advice of Professor Wang to be empathic to the reality of others, I have on many occasions ultimately reached the conclusion that the Chinese government’s human rights reality is not legitimate when viewed against the standards of fundamental international human rights, a view held by some Chinese academics as well (Biao 2022). First-hand insights from connections with people in China illuminate the internal logic for that reality and reduce the risk that foreign academics will impose underinformed views from afar.

Certainly, access to China does not mean unfettered access to people and information therein. The repressive chill under Xi Jinping’s leadership has enhanced longstanding barriers to Chinese academics being able to freely express their personal views without fear of blowback. Professor Odd Arne Westad wrote in June 2023 of the formidable challenges of understanding elite decision-making in Beijing and the broader atmosphere that “[p]eople in China are not yet experiencing the degree of fear and secrecy that they did under Mao, but they are getting there” (Westad 2023). Writing this chapter in early 2024, it is uncertain whether the degree of repression will plateau, become even more severe, or perhaps have times of relaxation even if not a general trend toward reopening. Though far from perfect, observations that come from being physically present in China are important for our understanding and, thankfully, my experience as well as that of other American academics who have visited China post-pandemic attest that spaces for frank discussions can still be carved out behind closed doors.

I greatly missed these spaces for intimate conversations during the pandemic. When I emailed a Chinese professor friend in May 2023 with news that my first post-pandemic trip to China had been canceled because of a postponed conference, she responded, “I am looking forward to having you with us in China.” I finally made it back to Beijing in January 2024 for an academic conference as part of the University of Pennsylvania’s Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. The trip was short, structured, and subdued. But at least it was one more small step toward reconnecting academics in post-pandemic U.S.-China relations. And I look forward to being in China again soon.