Remarks by Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch President, US-China Education Trust. McLean Foreign Policy Group, January 10, 2011

Transcription

1 Remarks by Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch President, US-China Education Trust McLean Foreign Policy Group, January 10, 2011 First, let me thank you for having me today. It is such a pleasure for me to talk with a group that is so closely connected to the Foreign Service and so deeply interested in world affairs. I think this group would agree that since the end of the cold war, the value of education and exchange has receded in importance and lost resonance with our government and, also, much of our foreign policy community. While 9/11 renewed interest in public diplomacy, as well as the study of critical need languages, requisite resources have not been forthcoming. "100,000 Strong" Initiative In the week before Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the United States, it is timely to discuss the importance of education and exchange in diplomacy. Nowhere is the need for the US to establish mutual trust and understanding greater than in China. President Obama recognized this when he announced during his visit to China the "100,000 Strong" initiative to send 100,000 American students to study in China over the next four years. As he also noted, "There are very few global challenges that can be solved unless China and the United States agree." Just as I am convinced that the relationship between the US and China is the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century; so, I am convinced that educational exchange is the best way, by far, to build mutual understanding and trust, which is sadly lacking in US-China relations. Because USCET, the non-profit which I head, sees the 100,000 Strong Initiative as a critical opportunity to build a stronger relationship between the US and China by ensuring that the next generation of American leaders has a deeper understanding of China, we embraced the president's call and launched the first program under this initiative. We have made travel grants to four universities - Arkansas, Boston, San Francisco State, and Southern Alabama - to send more of their students to study in China. We believe there is no substitute for the exchange experience. No amount of study, reading, watching movies, or surfing the Internet can convey the sense and nuance of a culture or the feelings and sentiments of a people. Only education and exchange can connect people to people across boundaries; offer face-to-face dialogue to build understanding of cultural values, language skills, trust, confidence, networks, and collaboration. The 100,000 Strong Initiative could not have come at a better time. As Carola McGiffert, senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific and director of the 100,000 Strong Initiative, told the participants at our 7th Annual American Studies Network conference at Jiangnan University in Wuxi last November, "The number of Chinese students in the US is eight times that of American students in China, and the number of Chinese who study English is more than 600 times that of Americans who study Chinese." She went on to say that

2 making up for the deficiency of such an imbalance is critical, as the huge imbalance in mutual understanding can wreck the bilateral strategic trust between the two countries. Declining Resources It is symptomatic, perhaps, of the times that a presidential initiative of great diplomatic importance, would carry with it not one cent of resources. While the Chinese government has shown its support through the announcement of 10,000 Bridge Scholarships for American students to study Chinese language in China, the US government expects the total estimated $68 million program to be entirely funded by the private sector. After World War II, our leaders understood that the challenges of the cold war required the US to win the hearts and minds of the people around the world, and they invested in education and exchange to make America competitive. Our leaders then understood that education and democracy go hand in hand, that the growth of democracy, economic prosperity and stability is linked to the advance of education. As a great democracy, the US has a vested interest in promoting democracy and economic stability throughout the world. When we support democracy and economic prosperity in the rest of the world, we are also helping ourselves, and it is right thing to do. During the height of the cold war, in 1957, Sputnik activated a strong US public diplomacy agenda, spurring this country to unprecedented levels of investment in education, not just in science and technology, but in languages, the social sciences, and area studies. Advancing education and exchange made a powerful difference. In marked contrast, the national response to this century's defining event, 9/11, has been to wage war, not to enhance investments in education and public diplomacy that build our capacity to understand and bridge religious, cultural, or national boundaries. Instead, we have let US competitiveness decline. In the intervening years, we have allowed funding for education and exchange programs to shrink, at the same time increasing barriers to international exchange. USIA, the agency charged with leading our public diplomacy efforts, was dismantled. And the woeful shortage of foreign language speakers and translators in our security and defense agencies has led Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) to say at a recent Congressional hearing that the lack of foreign-language skills could be a threat to national security. To drive home the point, the entire budget for Public Diplomacy in FY 2009 (broadcasting, information, and exchange programs) had been slashed to under $1 million, or roughly two- 100th of one percent of the 2009 Defense Department budget and less than what McDonald's spends on advertising. Resilience of American Education It is a tribute to the strength and resilience of American education that it remains a magnet, despite dwindling resources, for students and aspiring leaders around the world. According to the International Institute of Education (IIE), international student enrollments in the US climbed 3 percent in the academic year, primarily because of a 30 percent increase in the number of Chinese students coming to the US to study. The World Journal recently reported that the

3 falling dollar has made the US once again the number one choice for Chinese students seeking higher education abroad, making China the leading sending country of international students to the US. American education is now more than ever a bargain. The number of US students studying abroad, only one percent of enrolled college students, unfortunately, has decreased for the first time in 25 years. Attraction of American Education to the Chinese American styled education has always attracted the Chinese, and the history of US-China education interaction is a lesson of what education and exchange can contribute to diplomacy. China has been sending students to America since 1847, when Yung Wing became the first Chinese student to earn a degree in a North American university, Yale, and possibly the first Chinese student to earn a degree in any foreign university. Yung dreamed of enabling many other Chinese youth to study abroad so that they could return to China well equipped to contribute to China's modernization and advancement. In 1872, the Chinese Government agreed to his plan to establish the Chinese Educational Mission, and over the next decade it brought 120 Chinese boys to study in the US. The creation of the Chinese Educational Mission 136 years ago foreshadowed modern-day international education collaboration and student exchanges. The students involved in the Chinese Educational Mission in the US numbered only 120, but it established the tradition of Chinese students studying around the world. Just as today, America was the top destination for Chinese students seeking a higher education overseas. The system of overseas study that Yung Wing inaugurated has grown dramatically over the last 30 years, since Deng Xiao-ping's reforms began and the door to student exchange in China was reopened. Deng was following the century-old Chinese principle on the acceptable use of Western knowledge, established by the Qing Dynasty's influential viceroy Zhang Zhidong: "Chinese in essence, Western for practical development" [Zhongti Xiyong], when he said: "I support the increase in the number of students going abroad for further study, up to thousands and tens of thousands... [I]t serves to raise the standards of our own colleges and universities." For China, sending students to foreign countries was not a matter of cultural exchange - it was to learn from the west to make China strong. But the US also benefited directly from Yung Wing's Yale education when he came to Washington, DC in 1878 as a member of China's first permanent mission to this country. How fortunate it must have been for the US to have as a resident diplomat someone who had studied in this country and was thus well positioned to translate diplomatic concerns in ways most likely to be understood by both US and Chinese officials. Qing officials recalled the Chinese Educational Mission students in The flow of Chinese students to the US would resume in 1909, when Liang Cheng, one of the last students sent by the Mission, successfully proded the US to remit a part of the Boxer Indemnity, compensation forced

4 on the Chinese government in 1901 to eight countries, including the US, for the loss of lives and properties in the Boxer Rebellion of1900. Liang Cheng attended Phillips Academy in Andover as an eleven-year old in 1875 and was the star of the school's baseball team. While he was called home before he could attend college, he became China's minister to Washington ( ), and President Theodore Roosevelt recognized him as the baseball player who had hit a three-run homer to beat Roosevelt's Exeter squad. This was serendipity for China's efforts to win US agreement to the Boxer Indemnity Fund. But Liang was successful also because he understood the US and Americans. Listen to what he had to say, "The American government will be pleased to gain a reputation of being just and to bear witness to the development of talent through education. To use for educational purposes the money that is already allocated for indemnity would create benefit from damage, and gain from loss. The act would heighten China's morale, lay a foundation for the nation's resurgence, and lift us from humiliation." And he was right. When in 1908, the US Senate passed the resolution using excess Boxer Indemnity funds to create a fund to educate Chinese students, there was lavish praise. The New York Times characterized the Boxer Indemnity Fund as "an example of the principles of right and justice and highmindedness that prevail between honorable men." And what Edwin James, president of the University of Illinois wrote to Roosevelt at that time is just as valid today: "The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual, and commercial influence... The extension of such moral influence...would mean a larger return for a given outlay than could be obtained in any other manner. Trade follows moral and spiritual domination far more inevitably than it follows the flag." Personal Story James was right on the money. The Boxer Indemnity Fund not only established the Tsinghua School, today's Tsinghua University or MIT of China, but it created a reservoir of good will that has withstood the vicissitudes of US-China relations among the Chinese people. I know because my father was among the second contingent of Boxer scholars sent to study in America in 1911, the year the Qing dynasty was toppled and the Republic of China was founded. While it is well known that the Fulbright program has cultivated a generation of world leaders and has been successful in ways that advance both American interests and values, few Americans know about the Boxer scholars who exerted significant influence on the economic, political and cultural institutions of China. The Boxer returnees made outstanding contributions to engineering, industry, banking, the military and civil services. My father was the first Chinese to graduate from Harvard Law school and became the first Chinese to oversee the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, reforming and nationalizing its foreign administration, as well as returning tariff autonomy to China.

5 The Boxer returnees were noted, in particular, for their achievements in academia. Hu Shi is probably the best known in the west. He was a leading liberal intellectual of the New Culture Movement, which advocated saving China through cultural transformation. Also a Nationalist diplomat, who served as ambassador to the US (1938 to 1942) and a scholar, who became president of Peking University, his most important contribution was to establish the vernacular (baihua) as China's official written language (1922), making reading accessible to the ordinary people. As the great Sinologist John Fairbank put it, he broke "the tyranny of the classics," which "democraticized" China more than any political act. By 1917, the influence of Chinese, who were educated in America, had become so important that Tsinghua College publshed a "Who's Who of American Returned Students." This group formed the foundation of China's modernization. Interestingly, many of the students who went to Japan at the turn of the century returned to China as revolutionaries to overthrow the Qing dynasty. Many who went to France in the decade around World War I became prominent Communist revolutionaries, among them Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. My father exemplified those educated in America. He studied law to learn to use the west's legal codes and systems to help free China from foreign domination. He was never a revolutionary; he advocated change through legal means. Personal Commitment My father taught me the value of education and exchange. It is because of his legacy that I have spent the last decade of my life building the US-China Education Trust - to help the Chinese, particularly China's next-generation leaders, understand America. As a first generation Chinese American, I am a living testament to American education. The public schools of San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard taught me what it means to be an American. As an exchange student to the former Soviet Union, I learned the value of my American citizenship. When I joined the Peace Corps to teach English in Borneo, I became a true hyphenated American - Chinese by birth, American by choice, Asian by legal classification and, later, Jewish by marriage - comfortable in whichever culture I found myself. When I was invited in 1998 by Peking University to help revive its American Studies Center in celebration of its centennial, it also happened to be the 80th anniversary of my father's appointment as lecturer of international law at the university. Of course, I had to accept. I decided that the increasing popularization of US foreign policy allowed me as an individual to make a difference in the all-important US-China relationship, that I could turn myself into a vehicle of international education for China's best and brightest - the students of their premier universities. The US-China Education Trust really began on the campus of Peking University. Today, USCET works with some 50 Chinese institutions of higher education, plus a variety of Chinese government entities, to advance the study of the US. USCET programs have been well-received, and are growing, but when i think that we may, at best, reach only a few thousand of the over 22 million - and growing - university students in China, I realize that what USCET can do is a mere drop in the bucket.

6 Still, I am a strong believer in the power of education and exchange. During two of the blackest periods in recent US-China relations - the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the downing of the US spy plane on Hainan Island, I was on the campus of Peking University. While students, including some of my own, marched against the US in Beijing's streets, no one closed down my classes or programs. My friendships with colleagues and students also remained unchanged as before. The intrinsic value of education and exchange is that government-to-government relations may go up and down, but people-to-people relations endure. Conclusion I hope that occasions such as today's will inspire you to contribute, in your own way, to increase the number of American Students who study abroad, whether in China or elsewhere. There are no better means for achieving common understanding for a better world, and for peace among nations.