Taking Stock
In the years following the Cold War, the Soviet archives gradually opened up to the academic community. For the first time, scholars could read internal documents that had circulated internally during major events. Fascinating as it was, it also led to the awful realization that we didn’t know the Soviet Union half as well as we thought we did. To this day, historians are baffled how the world’s nuclear powers didn’t blow civilization into oblivion.
Ever since the souring of US-China relations in the early 2010s, scholars have wondered if there is a new Cold War on the horizon. In the 90s and 2000s, China was exciting and dynamic, the poster child for the World Bank, the nation that lifted almost a billion people out of extreme poverty. In the 2000s, publications like The New York Times described China in terms of economic success: “a country where everything is red hot,” with a “soaring,” “stronger,” and “revving” economy. Pick up a paper now, however, and China is characterized as uncooperative and untrustworthy.
For many casual news-followers, COVID-19 signaled the definitive break. Now the US and China employ terms such as “rivalry,” “derisking,” and “decoupling our economies” to describe their relationship. And while Sino-US relations have certainly fallen to lower points throughout history, now is no high point. The current tit-for-tat trade war, talk of competing economic trade coalitions such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or an exclusive advanced-economies-only trading club, is reminiscent of another petty, bitter, and toxic relationship between the USA and the Soviet Union. Of course, at that time, it wasn’t the BRI, it was the Marshall Plan, and it wasn’t an advanced economy trade group, but COMECON, a Communist-aligned organization. Obviously, these groups are not exactly equivalent to those modern day ‘counterparts’, but parallels between the Cold War and today have become increasingly clear.
But have things really gotten that bad? A slew of foreign policy experts and Cold War historians have weighed in on this issue. Odd Arne Westad, an expert on the Cold War and East Asian history, sees increasing hostility between the US and China as a second Cold-War-style conflict. In 2019, he penned his own version of George Kennan’s 1947 anonymous article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” a hugely influential Foreign Affairs article from the Cold War years that emphasized “containment,” a word that would define American policy towards communism for decades. Westad’s article, titled “The Sources of Chinese Conduct,” argues that just as the US must forge deeper friendships in the Indo-Pacific (as it did with Europe in the past), protect against internal disunity, and prepare itself for a decades-long conflict.
On the other hand, Thomas Christensen, a political scientist and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, argues that a Cold War necessitates a global competition to win hearts and minds for a particular ideology. China isn’t trying to export its ideology, or governance model, he argues. And as America rolls back its involvement in the global community, it seems as though the same may be true for the US.
For many however, the existence of a Cold War relies on the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Great powers engage in an indirect ‘cold war’, because a direct ‘hot war’ would quickly go nuclear. But nuclear weapons are still around, and in places with the highest tensions: India, Pakistan, China, Israel, and North Korea all have (or in Israel’s case, strongly believed to have) nuclear strike capabilities.
Does the American government see it as a Cold War? In 2021, amidst the COVID-19 crisis, but before Russia’s escalation of the war in Ukraine, Biden declared that America “[was] not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.” But much has changed since then, and it is growing increasingly harder to avoid noticing the similarities. Indeed, Trump’s rhetoric and trade wars have increased the pressure among all countries of having to ‘pick a side’. And with heightening tensions, people are remembering that both China and the US have nuclear weapons stockpiles, and Xi and Trump seem to have itchy trigger fingers. As relations between the US and China deteriorate, the priority should be ensuring that nuclear annihilation never happens, and as the case of the Soviet archives shows, the USA needs to know more about China.
If this is a new Cold War, is America prepared? Is it even taking things seriously? To tackle this question, I examine not what China and the US are saying to each other, but at how they are preparing their citizens to interact. In the 50s and 60s, America poured money and resources into Soviet Studies. How does the current US-China rivalry compare? As we enter a ‘new’ age of global competition, how similar is it to the last one? How have US citizens learned about China and Russia, and does the Cold War period have any insights to offer?
Soviet Studies and China Studies
In 1948, America was in no way intellectually prepared for a Cold War with the USSR. “Never before,” one analyst said shortly after WWII, “did so many know so little about so much.” In the first decade of Russian Studies’ existence, it was conceived almost entirely as a way to “know the enemy, but did not remain that way for long. From the 40s onward, Sovietology or Kremlinology budded into existence, grew voraciously in the 1950s and 60s, then declined in later years due to penny-pinching programs and campus conflicts over departments being too anti-Soviet, or not anti-Soviet enough. We see this happening today too, with the closure of outlets like The China Project, which shuttered in 2023. Late in the Cold War, Soviet Studies became deeply politicized, resulting in an intellectual field that was “like trench warfare, generating heavy casualties but little progress.” By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, scholars were so focused on one-upping each other that they used it to win political debates rather than more deeply explore why the USSR had broken up.
Along with the State Department, the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations pumped huge quantities of money into Soviet Studies. Columbia University’s Russian Institute was founded in 1946 with Rockefeller money, the first ever “area studies” center. In 1948, a grant from the Carnegie Corporation created Harvard’s Russian Research Center, and both continued to provide grants to Soviet, then Post-Soviet studies until the present day. And, as David Engerman writes in Know Your Enemy, “by the 1960s, the Ford Foundation and the State Department were each contributing upward of USD $300,000 per year to support American-Soviet scholarly exchange programs, knowing full well that as many as 75% of the participants were historians and humanists.” All hail the liberal arts degree. The research this investment produced was gobbled up by foreign policy workers, the military and the CIA.
Throughout the Cold War, the primary frustration of anyone working in Russian studies was how difficult it was to do meaningful research. The vast majority of American students had no way to access Soviet archives to conduct research and there was little possibility of traveling in the USSR or doing exchanges. By 1965, there were only thirty American graduate students and faculty doing stays in the USSR.
China studies is doing better today, even after COVID, compared to Soviet Studies at the height of the Cold War. Since 2000, more and more research institutions focused on China have emerged. The Brookings Institution opened its John L. Thornton China Center in 2006; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Carnegie China was also established in 2006, and the Wilson Center opened its Kissinger Institute on China and the United States in 2008.
In the USA, Chinese language education boomed after the turn of the new century in what became known as the “Chinese Craze” (汉语热). After 9/11, the US government ramped up initiatives to train Americans in languages they deemed critical for US national security, among them Chinese. The National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) was launched in 2006, which includes NSLI-Youth and STARTALK programs. The College Board created the Chinese AP course in 2003. Cooperation with China at this time was huge—the College Board worked with Hanban (an offshoot of China’s ministry of education) to offer AP Chinese classes, and until the program became a hot potato in 2018, the USA had the greatest number of Confucius Institutes out of any country in the world. Confucius Institutes have always been instruments of Chinese soft power, but after the first Trump administration accused the institutes of spreading CCP propaganda and cut funding to schools that hosted an institute, many vanished.
In fact, while the US-China relationship soured after the 2008 financial crisis, to many, the divide was not clear until Trump’s first presidency, the Xinjiang human rights crisis, accusations of espionage, and COVID-19. The increasing divergence and hostility in academia, combined with the recent difficulty in doing exchanges is eerily similar to the Cold War academic situation.
To learn more, I spoke to Sergey Radchenko, a professor renowned for his work on both China and the Soviet Union. According to Radchenko, the academic landscape is not good. He says that China is tightening restrictions on academics coming to study in Mainland China. It was easier to get into the archives under Hu Jintao (2002-2012) than it is under Xi Jinping (2012-), he says, and anthropologists and social scientists face ethical dilemmas when conducting interviews, for fear of bringing trouble to those they talk to.
Despite this, Radchenko says that the pickings for China Studies are better than Russia Studies, where funding and interest has shriveled up despite Russia continuing to play a significant role in global affairs. Despite the current hot war instigated by Russia, the USA is woefully underprepared to understand Eastern Europe.
“There has not been an effort to rebuild the expertise” that America had in Russia studies during the Cold War, Radchenko says. While there are many young academics pursuing Russian or Slavic Studies PhDs, after graduation, “the [academic] positions are not there.” Within post-Soviet studies, there is a move to decolonize, to focus more on non-Russian post-Soviet states. Not only is there little student and non-academic interest in those states, Radchenko explains, but focusing on them comes at the expense of Russia Studies, which policymakers in Washington need right now. Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and then again after the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia Studies has continued to decline.
The humanities as a whole are shrinking, Radchenko says. Professors who retire aren’t being replaced, there is an enormous shift away from the humanities and social sciences (particularly History and Russian), towards STEM. Indeed, in 2020, humanities degrees made up less than 10% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, an all-time low and a 25% decrease compared to just eight years before. Radchenko explains that while Chinese Studies does fare “a little bit better” when compared to Russian Studies nowadays—there is more funding, and more academic positions—the situation remains dire.
This is particularly true when it comes to knowledge of Chinese languages. Visitors to HNC frequently remark that the school is special for cultivating students with strong Mandarin skills, and mention that many China experts today can’t speak Chinese. That’s because for a vast amount of China experts, Chinese is hard. For many, breakthroughs in the language only come from an immersion environment. It’s one thing to get contact hours in the classroom, quite another to have contact hours every second of every day, navigating apps, restaurants, and random interactions on the street all in Chinese. And that’s not even including all the cultural knowledge—from the pop culture references to understanding the thousand bureaucratic processes of daily life. This is what makes exchanges and years abroad so valuable.
Exchanges for National Security
America’s first exchange programs (both scholarly and professional) were actually developed specifically to increase mutual travel and understanding between the USA and the USSR. After a meeting between President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in 1955, the organization People to People International was established to encourage ordinary Americans to visit the Soviet Union. The organization expanded, then privatized, then went bankrupt during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 1961, Congress passed the Fulbright-Hays Act to promote the learning of geopolitically important languages. This was due to the rising political tensions and security fears about the Soviet Union and its allies: according to one Department of Education director, at that time, the US didn’t have the scholars with language expertise that would allow them to study three-quarters of the world’s population. Government support for language learning comes overwhelmingly out of concern for national security.
Studying abroad for Chinese is far easier than studying Russia in the Soviet Union was. Students can turn to government-funded programs or special fellowships, scholarships, and grants to get into Chinese language environments. The Critical Language Scholarships, NSLI-Y initiatives, Gilman Scholarships, Boren Awards, Fulbrights, and more are some of the many academic opportunities available. Until its China program was shut down during COVID, Peace Corps was another way to “get in.” But by far the most common language opportunity is the compulsory year abroad in most Chinese-language programs at American universities, where American undergrads spend a year or a semester at a foreign university taking language classes.
It’s an exciting prospect, and one of the draws of language programs. Before the pandemic, 347,099 Americans were studying abroad all over the world. After most places had reopened in 2022-23, over 41,000 Americans studied abroad in Italy, over 17,000 went to France, 5,900 went to Korea, and 9,600 went to Japan, to name a few of the more popular places.
Unlike elsewhere, the student numbers for China dropped to an all-time low during the Coronavirus pandemic and have still not recovered, even as the number of students studying in other places in East Asia has made a successful comeback. In the 2022-2023 school year, the number of US students studying in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore exceeded their pre-pandemic levels. The same cannot be said for China, which did not reopen until January 2023, meaning that many study-abroad programs (along with the Hopkins Nanjing Center, SAIS’ branch in China), only returned to being in-person for the 2023-2024 school year.
Those who spend time in China today often become “China hands” tomorrow. What is worrying is that while the numbers for Taiwan and Singapore are increasing, those countries are not absorbing the entire 10,000+ cohort of Chinese learners that—if not for COVID—would have gone to mainland China. China expertise is drying up. If China experts now struggle with Chinese, then imagine a world years from now in which only a fraction of that number can grasp the language.
In November 2023, Xi announced that China was “willing to invite 50,000 American young people to come to China for exchanges and studies in the next five years.” Averaging to 10,000 students a year, this is about the same amount (in fact, it’s slightly less) than the average of 13,000+ students that America was sending from 2009 to 2018. It’s an offer to return to the status quo, almost. But can the US go back to that? Under the new Trump administration, that seems unlikely. In the coming years, we might see more universities partnering with Taiwanese institutions for years abroad, like Harvard is doing, or simply an inward turn which sends fewer Americans abroad in general.
In the face of shrinking access to China, some researchers are turning to the “traditional methods” of Pekinology used during the Cold War. A study edited by Andrew Mertha, another well-known professor at SAIS, collects the methods of renowned China scholars who worked when travel to China was impossible, instead of just inconvenient. From it, we learn that much more information about China is publicly available now than it was then, but that the lessons of Pekinology still have their uses.
America had Kremlinology, too—a reading of the entrails scattered in the pages of Pravda, official announcements, or things seemingly benign like seating arrangements at public appearances to deduce what policy makers in Moscow were thinking. Perhaps Kremlinology, when added to Pekinology, has something to teach the analysts today. But it is absolutely no substitute for on-the-ground experience. One thing about Kremlinology is abundantly clear: it wasn’t ideal, and it wasn’t enough.
What to Do?
If WWII can be called the physicists’ war, then the Cold War was the social scientists’ war, and the Cold War certainly drove the trend of bringing academics into the policymakers’ room. While we now live in a digital age, this new great power conflict cannot only be the computer scientists’ war. The need for cross-cultural understanding is more important now than ever. Not so that “we can win” and “they will lose,”but so that we do not bring about armageddon. We ignore the humanities at our own peril.
More importantly, people-to-people diplomacy – real interaction between nations – is more important now than it was before, especially between the young people who will be responsible for the world and its inhabitants twenty years from now. This is true not just for the USA, China, and the USSR/Russia, but for every relationship.
Facilitating people-to-people exchange is the mission of The Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center. Opened in 1986, the center has operated through all the major US-China events of the past four decades: Tiananmen, SARS, COVID, and hopefully, what comes next. Recently however, it feels as though HNC lives under a stay of execution. The past two times that delegates from the DC campus came to HNC, students wondered if HNC would be shut down. Then this academic year, SAIS launched the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF). Along with the China Global Research Center (CGRC), which was launched in 2021, these two draw heavily on SAIS DC experts and US based academics. Some students in Nanjing felt that the HNC was being left out, sidelined in favor of SAIS DC.
I talked to Dr. Adam Webb, co-director of the Hopkins Nanjing Center, who said that a few years ago, the DC, Bologna, and Nanjing campuses were even more separate than they are now. With the resumption of visits of DC and Bologna scholars to Nanjing, SAIS campuses are actually more connected than ever.
I also learned that part of the reason that SAIS’ three China-focused centers—CGRC, ACF, and HNC – are separate entities is because the funding for each comes from different sources, and each have their own “take” on China. For example, the ACF and CGRC reflect Professor Jessica Chen Weiss’and Professor Andrew Mertha’s views on China respectively. The HNC, meanwhile, “does not have a position on what China-US relations should be. We just provide a neutral space for serious thought and dialogue about these important questions. That gives us unique value and significance regardless of the ups and downs over the last four decades. Inevitably, the way that other institutions or stakeholders relate to this ebbs and flows,” Webb says. Perhaps this is safest: HNC’s impartiality lets it maintain its collaboration with Nanjing University and not be forced into closure over political agendas in Washington or Beijing.
Webb also expanded on the issue of funding, explaining that getting funding for any China-related activities is harder now than it was a decade or so ago, during the heyday of globalization. Now that that “China”has become a political hot potato, the usual sources of funding are now much more wary of where their money is going, and what their grants are supporting. Another factor is that people increasingly doubt “that China’s weight in the world would continue increasing at the same fast pace [as a decade or two ago],” says Webb. “With economic stagnation and demographic shifts and other headwinds now, it is possible that we may be at or already past ‘peak China,’” and with it, peak China interest.
This is strikingly different from Cold War rhetoric, where interest in the Soviet Union stemmed not only from the USSR’s economic rise, but its hostility towards capitalist great powers. It seems as though China is not getting the airtime it deserves as a growing rival. The same is true for Russia.
The hypothesis I had at the outset of writing this article was that the US’ response to China would be roughly equivalent to its response to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. I have found it to be not entirely true: For sure, the USA is much better equipped to understand China now than it was to understand the USSR in the wake of WWII, but that’s a pitifully low bar. The US isn’t as well equipped to deal with Russia or China as it was a mere ten years ago. While more interest in the general Indo-pacific is a step forward, we should not ignore the two steps back of the past five years. If China is really an adversarial state, then it follows that ensuring academic reengagement is vital for US preparedness. The Trump administration’s actions to destroy the Department of Education, shutter the Wilson Center and its China programs, cut funding to Radio Free Asia inspires absolutely no confidence that the current administration cares to encourage understanding of China or Chinese.
Ideally, HNC should be flourishing. More students should be encouraged to come. Money should be flowing in. Professors should be paid more. We have the only uncensored open-stacks library in China. Americans take graduate-level classes in Mandarin, and Chinese take graduate-level classes in English. There is no other program like ours.
A founding aspiration of HNC was that someday, America and China’s top diplomats would both discover that they were graduates of the HNC. Then they could reminisce about the green carpets, dishes at the食堂, the strong community spirit and other HNC-特色. That would be better, I think.
Editor: Jay Figueredo