A record number of 4.8 million international students were enrolled in different Chinese institutions in 2019. Previously in 2000, only 0.5 million international students opted to study in China. The inbound and outbound academia-related migration is not limited to students only, but also the teaching staff, researchers and laboratory technicians have multiplied manifolds to create strides in global education scenario. China is already eyeing a significant investment in education sector through its multibillion dollar One Belt and One Road (OBOR) Initiative. From this point of view, it has made international collaboration with top-tier universities of the US, the UK/EU and Australia. However, despite millions of investment in education sector, the restrictive censorship and government policies are providing less intellectual freedom to its students which is forcing international institutions to close down their remote international campuses in China.
For instance, Times Higher Education (THE) reported that last summer, 234 international institutions and programmes rolled out from China due to restrictive environment and odd monitoring protocols. The US has also warned potential threat of Chinese espionage, popularity of Chinese culture & language and its increasing influence on American soil. The US president Donald Trump in one of his speeches called Chinese students and researchers as 'spies' invading the America. However, some believe, it is in retaliation to the newly-imposed trade barriers between the US and China, and when Trump administration will complete its tenure, the next in-line government may lift visa restrictions on students' mobility and encourage Chinese students to study in the US. This will ultimately bring positive results and the situation will shift in favour of China with the introduction of supportive and 'pro-China' student policies. It is hard to predict that what policies will the new US administration bring-in, but if the Chinese side showed any aggression on diplomatic front in education sector, it will cost China a significant decline in international students and a great loss to its perceived dream of making China a favourite education destination.
Strict visa policies and restrictions on Chinese students will cause decline of Chinese students in the US, the UK/EU and Australia, but on the other hand, it will create opportunity for OBOR countries, including Pakistan, to make their presence felt and increase students exchange programmes with China. Such opportunities will cause a major uplift of economy at domestic and regional levels and will create local workforce to cater for grass-root development. Unlike Japanese, who endorsed American culture as a hard-power tool after WWII, China could penetrate the global education market by using soft-power. Elaborating this fact, UNESCO in its 2016 report, has already reprimanded that '700,000 Chinese students are a major soft-power integration tool and untapped potential which it (China) could utilise any time in future'.
China being an emerging power, is keeping all diplomatic channels open and trying capitalizing all economic opportunities, including education. China Scholarship Council (CSC) is playing a major role to represent China as a favourite study destination. Beside this, CSC is supporting Chinese students to study abroad with the objective to create soft image and built strong diplomatic network through student-to-student interactions. In order to achieve this objective, China has gained momentum in enrolment ratio of its students in foreign universities. Furthermore, it has attained significant progress in attracting international students to its country. Although, language is the major barrier for international students, but China's Confucius institutions and short language courses have bridged this gap to surpass all such barriers and is providing full facilities to international students. For instance, in the US (34%), in Australia (38%) and in the UK/EU (41%) of the international students are from China. The universities in these countries are trying to cope up with their budgetary requirements and balancing their cost by charging international tuition fee; however, the Chinese are happy to increase their student outflux and secure diplomatic fronts using soft-power tactics. On the other hand, the influx of the Chinese students has drastically increased; which could be counted as another milestone and a feather in the cap for an emerging economic giant.
Student-to-student diplomacy is likely the future China is aiming at. In order to practically conceive this, strong interaction between home and host students is essential. It is vital for China to defuse the western hegemony and gain supremacy in global education diplomacy by engaging none-state actors, create more student leaders and ambassadors, ease language barriers, revise censorship laws and lessen control on freedom of intellectual expression.
(The writer works as an executive assistant at the Prime Minister's Office, Board of Investment, Government of Pakistan)
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Copyright Business Recorder, 2019
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