Bridging Minds across the Pacific: U.S.-China Educational Exchanges, 1978-2003 (review)

As one of the most important factors in U.S.-China relations, educational exchange has resumed and been expanded drastically since the end of the 1970s as a result of China's adoption of reform and its strategy of opening to and normalizing diplomatic relations with the United States. Between 1978 and 2003, hundreds of thousands of Chinese as well as Americans have crossed the Pacific for educational purposes. Since the end of the 1990s, an increasingly large number of Chinese have returned to China with rich educational and work experiences gained in the United States. The expansion of U.S.-China educational exchanges has helped bridge the divide between the two peoples and strengthen ties between the two nations. Although there have been a number of original studies on the restoration of educational relations between the two nations and on Chinese students and scholars in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this edited volume offers the most systematic, comprehensive, in-depth, and updated examination of the development and impact of educational exchange between the United States and China since 1978.

Based on papers originally presented at an international conference held at Fudan University in Shanghai in 2003, this book consists often chapters contributed by nine prominent scholars and administrators who in various capacities have personally participated in U.S.-China educational exchanges. The foreword is written by Dr. Richard C. Levin, who, as president of Yale University, is committed to the establishment of Yale as a leader in international studies and has played an active role in building close cooperative relations with leading Chinese universities. Having received a warm welcome in China on his trip to that country, including a lengthy reception given by President Jiang Zemin-and this right after the midair collision between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese jet fighter over the South China Sea in 2001—Dr. Levin has come to believe that government tensions will inevitably ebb and flow, but "connections between our institutions of higher education should be viewed as a steadying and civilizing influence." Thus, he is optimistic that "educational exchanges offer opportunities not only for individual advancement, but also for the promotion of cross-national understanding that is vital to create a more peaceful and productive world" (p. xiii).

The theoretical foundation and clear goals for the book are masterfully laid out by Cheng Li in the first chapter. Tracing the beginning of China's most recent study-abroad movement to an important decision made by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, Li points out that the policy makers of both countries had slightly different agendas when they planned and promoted the educational exchanges that have taken place in the last two decades. Although they had to face a number of dilemmas such as the possibility of a brain drain, an influx of Western ideas, and the transmission of science and technology to the Chinese, the political leaders of both nations, Li argues, have achieved their basic goals. While China has quadrupled its gross national product within two decades and drastically reduced the disparity between its own institutions of higher learning and the top Western universities, Washington is happy to see a peaceful evolution taking place in this Communist country. The growth and dynamism of educational exchange between the two countries, Li believes, have served as a bridge over the troubled waters of U.S.-China relations, helping reduce the negative impact of a number of disastrous incidents such as the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the collision of the military planes in 2001. The impact and implications of educational exchange between the United States and China, Li contends, can be better understood through a constructivist approach that focuses more on the socially constructed nature of international politics and that...