The gaping trade deficit of the US with China over the past few years led to an ongoing trade war. But there is one aspect of US-Chinese exchange that is much less reported on, while its impact is becoming much bigger: the exchange of international students. At 360,000, there are now 30 times as many Chinese students in the US as there are US students in China.
If the US managed to send more of its sons and daughters to China to study, part of the education imbalance would be rectified — and with it an information asymmetry that exists between the two countries. But as long as that doesn’t happen, the number of Americans with a working knowledge of China is likely to fall further behind the number of Chinese who are familiar with the US.
Among the news of the escalating trade war between the US and China, the Open Doors report of the Institute for International Education last week got a bit snowed under. But its findings were head-turning. A record number of international students, 1.1m, were studying in the US last year. And for the first time in history, Chinese accounted for more than one-third of them.