Mike Thompson was about to go to Beijing last year with Fulbright funding to investigate how the Chinese government recruits and trains its officials.
When the United States suspended all Fulbright programs in China in July as part of sanctions for Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its Fulbright program offered him and some other Chinese-centered academics the opportunity to move the Fulbright program to China. his fieldwork in Taiwan. Mr. Thompson, a 30-year-old doctoral student at the University of Michigan, whose first trip to China was in 2009, was able to change the subject to the Taiwan bureaucracy, but was disappointed with the Trump administration’s decision. .
“It’s a personal setback for me and a big setback for the US-China relationship,” he said.
The number of American students in China has fallen by more than a fifth since the peak period 2011-2012, according to data released in November by the Institute of International Education. The number of American students in Taiwan has increased by almost 55% during the same period.
The change comes amid a deterioration in the Washington-Beijing relationship and, according to educators, predates the Covid-19 pandemic. Interest in studying Chinese on U.S. campuses has cooled, they said.