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Meredith Chen

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, it confronts a new world order dominated by its relationship with China. In this wide-ranging series, we examine the pressure points and possibilities in those ties, from hard tech to soft power. Here, Meredith Chen looks at how tensions and shrinking academic exchange may be eroding America’s deep, experience-based understanding of China.
Long before China could be studied through satellite images, social media, big data or computer modelling, American scholars learned about the country the slow way.
Many travelled to the country. Some went far beyond its major cities, reaching remote county towns and villages by train, bus and boat to conduct fieldwork.
They spent months, even years, knocking on doors, lingering over tea, combing through archives, and interviewing cadres and ordinary members of the public to build a deep understanding of a country undergoing extraordinary transformation.
This was the reform era. As China reopened and the two countries’ relationship normalised after prolonged Cold War estrangement, American scholars gained access to a society that had been closed to them for decades.
Many of those who entered China in those years would go on to become the backbone of American expertise on the country, shaping scholarship, training future generations and influencing how Washington dealt with Beijing.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, however, that intellectual tradition is under strain.
Observers caution that America’s ability to understand China is undergoing a generational rupture, as specialists with deep in-country experience are leaving the stage while the conditions that once nurtured such expertise are disappearing as ties become increasingly tense.
“America’s ability to understand and manage its most consequential strategic relationship is eroding,” according to a report released in March by the US-China Education Trust, a non-profit organisation.
It pointed to the dwindling number of Americans studying in China and warned that the US could face a “critical shortage of grounded China expertise within a decade”.
A fascinated generation
American expertise on China did not begin with reform and opening-up. Earlier generations, including heavyweights such as John King Fairbank, laid the foundations for modern China scholarship and influenced generations of scholars who later came to prominence.
But it was the cohort – political scientists, historians and anthropologists – that entered China in the 1980s and 1990s that gained unprecedented opportunities for sustained, on-the-ground study.
Many of them came of age during the Cold War and experienced the political and intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s, experts said.

Two movements were particularly influential in shaping their world view: the anti-Vietnam war movement and the Cultural Revolution.
For many of them, China was a subject of “both fascination and mystery”, and they developed a strong interest in the communist revolution and, “to varying degrees, felt sympathy for China’s socialist experiment”, said Guo Wu, a historian and former professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.
According to Ding Xueliang, professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, when those American scholars began to conduct fieldwork in China after 1979, they confronted the realities of the Cultural Revolution and experienced a bitter process of “waking from a great dream” as they reassessed their beliefs.
This painful disillusionment was channelled into a sustained focus on ordinary Chinese society, including poorer and less-developed communities, he said in an article published online in May.
Cuts and restrictions
Ding is not optimistic about the future of China expertise in the US as the older generation of scholars gradually retires.
“Will there still be deeply knowledgeable China scholars after [this] generation leaves the stage? I certainly hope so, but the outlook is not encouraging,” he said.
Of the many factors behind this darkening outlook, analysts said, the most important was the rapid erosion of opportunities for Americans to conduct on-the-ground research in China as pressure increased from both sides.
The flow of American students into Chinese universities has sharply declined since the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the continued deterioration of US-China relations.
Today, fewer than 2,000 Americans are studying in China, down from roughly 15,000 a decade ago and still far below pre-pandemic levels, according to the US-China Education Trust.
In the US, growing political scrutiny and cuts to federal funding for China studies have limited research and exchange programmes, while China has tightened controls over visiting scholars and made visas harder to get.
While American scholars were once warmly welcomed and even treated as honoured guests, foreign researchers today are more likely to encounter suspicion about their intentions.

As Chinese society became more globally connected and confident, the West no longer possessed “the same aura of mystery or prestige that it once did”, which made the interpersonal and institutional dynamics that once facilitated scholarly engagement more complex, Wu noted.
For Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow for the Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, the loss of experiential knowledge that comes from living in China contributed to “a serious gap” in US understanding of US-China relations.
“It is not language skills that I worry about,” said Wilder, who formerly held senior roles related to China and East Asia at the US National Security Council and CIA. “But the ‘feel’ for new China and the societal ecosystem can only be learned with long-term immersion in China.”
Passing the torch
Beyond shrinking access, Wu said that US students studying China today increasingly viewed it through the lens of strategic competition and national security, a tendency he attributed in part to the tenor of mainstream discourse on China.
For scholars of previous generations, engagement with the country was often driven by “a personal and intellectual passion”, he explained.
The “deep sense of curiosity about China” had been ruptured, Wu said, along with “the aspiration to travel to China, immerse themselves in its society, and understand it on its own terms”.
Many younger scholars today approach China through well-established disciplinary frameworks, producing important scholarship but also contributing to a “more professionalised and specialised approach” to the field, he added.
“[A] more detached and ostensibly ‘rational’ assessment of China has also become increasingly influential among younger scholars and policy analysts,” he said.
Diao Daming, a professor at Renmin University of China’s School of International Studies, drew a similar contrast.
“The older generation … faced a China that needed to be continually understood,” he said. “While the younger generation confronts a China that is continually developing – a China they increasingly perceive as a so-called rival to the US.”
While the work of the older generation sought to explain China to the US and the wider world and generally favoured stable bilateral relations, he said many younger scholars approached China warily with an underlying orientation towards containing China’s rise and preserving America’s dominant position.
The earlier generation approached China through disciplines such as history, literature, sociology and anthropology, while many younger scholars approached China mainly through the lens of economics, political science and international relations, and often relied more heavily on data than long-term immersion, he added.
The current generation of American China experts “seems to have lost interest in Chinese culture and history”, and may not even possess good Chinese-language skills like their predecessors, Diao said.
Many had not spent enough time living in different parts of China and therefore lacked much of a “personal feel” for the country, he added.
For Ding, the issue was not only the passing of the torch to a new generation but also the marginalisation of older, established China scholars in Washington, which had left policy debates increasingly dominated by superficial assessments, he said in another article published in May.
Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Washington-based think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies, however, said he had seen no evidence that younger Americans were broadly more critical of China than previous generations or less interested in studying it.


Rather, the changing environment surrounding China itself played a larger role in reshaping the field, argued Kennedy, who has travelled regularly to China for decades.
“China’s domestic politics are tighter. Its engagement with the world has more restrictions. This is less about Americans changing over the course of generations than changes in China that Americans and others are perceiving.”
Blocked pipeline
Neysun Mahboubi, who directs the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and regularly brings American students to China for study trips, said his biggest concern was not the current moment, but the pipeline crisis that could leave the country short of qualified specialists in the coming decades.
He also pushed back against framing the issue simply as a generational divide, arguing that a key challenge was increasingly one of material incentives. The erosion of career opportunities had made China studies a less attractive path for young Americans than it once was, he said.
These trends predated the pandemic, he noted, and even emerged before the first Trump administration.
Foreign firms retreating from China or increasingly hiring local talent were not a new phenomenon, Mahboubi explained, while “budget cuts in the federal government displacing many young China analysts is of a more recent vintage”.
“China is the most consequential bilateral relationship for the US right now, but some jobs that used to exist, whether in business or in government, don’t exist any more.”
He added that the picture remained dynamic and that there was “at least some cause for optimism” that US students’ interest in China might rebound.
“Maybe precisely because there’s such a clear sense now that China is the primary geopolitical relationship for the US to be concerned about, so certainly at some schools, especially elite American institutions, there seems to be an uptick in interest in China studies.”
The changing balance of expertise, some scholars said, was also visible from the Chinese side.
Wu added that Chinese studies on America had been greatly enhanced in the past few years, resulting in expanding research interest and output. He also pointed to the “demystification” of the US in contemporary China.


As more Chinese scholars, students and travellers gained first-hand experience of American society, the US had become less an object of “admiration, imagination, or ideological projection”, and more one of Chinese observation, analysis and evaluation, he said.
Chinese studies of the US had contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the American political system, he added.
But Chinese scholars studying the US also faced growing challenges in conducting on-the-ground fieldwork, experts said.
Kennedy said he was worried that “we’re actually moving towards scholarly decoupling”.
“If the relationship between the two countries at the political level does not achieve some greater measure of genuine stability, then we will increasingly become strangers with each other,” he warned.


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Geopolitical friction and a lack of career paths are hollowing out the pipeline of US specialists who truly understand China


Geopolitical friction and a lack of career paths are hollowing out the pipeline of US specialists who truly understand China.


Fewer opportunities, less passion, no clue? How the US’ China expertise is fading

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Geopolitical friction and a lack of career paths are hollowing out the pipeline of US specialists who truly understand China

Geopolitical friction and a lack of career paths are hollowing out the pipeline of US specialists who truly understand China