The US and Taiwan have long been close education partners; however, anxiety about China’s influence and enthusiasm about Taiwan’s changing geopolitical role have created a flood of new and expanded initiatives between the two sides – initiatives that some China experts warn cannot truly replace engagement with the mainland.
“Due to current US-China geopolitical tensions, there are fewer incentives for universities to partner with Chinese institutions and less certainty that such partnerships will last, which means that people are turning to Taiwan and realising its strengths,” said Adrienne Wu, the programme manager at the Global Taiwan Institute, a Washington think tank.
Such strengths are not limited to Taiwan’s ability to provide Chinese language and cultural immersion, opportunities that China hawks and doves alike agree are important.
In the case of FIU, according to Leland Lazarus, an associate director for national security policy at the school, the university had been seeking a top-rated hospitality school to partner with. “Shih Chien will help connect our students and faculty with one of the most important democracies in the world,” he added.
Florida was especially hard hit, but nationwide legislative scrutiny on Sino-American educational partnerships, particularly at public schools, has increased in recent years. In Louisiana, Montana, Ohio and Texas, bills introduced or signed into law require everything from mandatory reporting of partnerships to denying all entry of Chinese students.
Meanwhile, ties between the US and Taiwan have intensified. In 2020, Washington and Taipei launched the US-Taiwan Education Initiative, which expands opportunities for Americans to learn Mandarin and teach English in Taiwan.
Since then, according to the American Institute in Taiwan, Taipei has signed MOUs with 24 US states. And 56 US universities have formed fresh or first-ever partnerships with the self-governed island, often in addition to existing mainland partnerships.
In 2021, Northwestern University in Illinois became the first US university to sign an MOU under the US-Taiwan Education Initiative. Meanwhile, according to its website, it still has 12 active agreements with mainland Chinese schools.
This spring, Middlebury College in Vermont launched a new language programme at Kaohsiung’s National Sun Yat-sen University, a complement to its Mandarin course at Capital Normal University in Beijing.
For some US schools, Taiwan has replaced mainland China as the destination of choice for Chinese language and cultural immersion, often as a result of government funding restrictions. The Defence Department’s Language Flagship programme – which offers Chinese at a handful of universities across the country – previously financed experiences in Nanjing, Tianjin or Beijing for an academic year, but now only offers Taipei as an option for Mandarin learners.
Universities are institutions that outlast political moments. They even outlast governments
The Boren Awards for intensive language and cultural study, also administered by the Pentagon, as well as the State Department’s Fulbright and Critical Language Scholarship, have either suspended or terminated their mainland China programming in recent years, while maintaining or expanding their Taiwan presence.
According to Brian Flaherty, the associate director of the Chinese Flagship programme at Indiana University Bloomington, the drop in government funding for study in China is pushing students away, even though many are interested in heading to the mainland. “It’s just a much harder sell if you have to fund yourself,” he said.
But Flaherty said that the political pivot away from China has led to some promising outcomes, too: universities now have the opportunity to strengthen their ties to Taiwan and right-size their presence on the island after years of relative underinvestment.
Taipei’s evolving geopolitical position, partly driven by its role in strategic technologies like semiconductors, has also sparked new forms of US-Taiwan academic collaboration.
This summer, the University of Washington is launching a study abroad programme at National Taiwan University focused on semiconductor design, promising students “rare access to Taiwan’s leading semiconductor companies and research institutes”, according to its website.
Meanwhile, in December, students from Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business made their first-ever study trek to Taiwan, meeting with Taiwanese companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Foxconn and various technology startups.
In November, Montana and Taiwan jointly announced a new Mandarin programme at the University of Montana. Last year, the university had come under congressional scrutiny for cooperating with a Hong Kong-based non-profit for a study abroad programme in mainland China.
But some schools that faced disruptions with their mainland China partnerships still haven’t filled the void in their Chinese language and cultural immersion programming.
For China experts, the growth of US-Taiwan education exchange is welcome, but should not come at the expense of universities’ presence on the mainland.
Denis Simon, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington and a key figure behind numerous US-China partnerships in higher education, stressed the “vast difference” between the two locales.
“Way back before US-China normalisation, I received very good language training in Taiwan,” he said. “But Taiwan is an island culture and it’s unto itself. Mainland China is a mega country of a billion people – and that’s the place we really need to understand more completely.”
Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University, acknowledged the increasingly restrictive environment for research in mainland China, but stressed that American students are needed in both mainland China and Taiwan.
Lewis, who spent significant time in each studying Mandarin and conducting legal research, said that “they are not interchangeable experiences, even for language learning”.
Long-standing relationships with the mainland do serve as a bulwark against the one-way shift of programmes to Taiwan – particularly if the US partner is a private institution.
Princeton in Beijing, where the likes of former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger got their start in learning Mandarin in the 1990s, is returning to China this summer, joining other long-standing programmes like the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies that have remained operational in China even through the pandemic.
For schools with supportive leadership, there is an appetite not just to revive mainland programmes shuttered during the pandemic but to grow engagement.
According to William Kirby, a professor of China studies at Harvard who began working on US-China educational partnerships in the 1980s, the university is opening or re-establishing many more ties in China than it has closed.
The “knee-jerk reaction” to pressures to sever ties with China obscures the “extraordinary quality of both the faculty and the students from Chinese universities”, he said, noting the lack of clear national security justifications for some of the closures.
This summer, Harvard’s centre in Shanghai – one of several hubs established by Ivy League schools in major Chinese cities – is collaborating with Fudan University on a new study abroad initiative focused on the city’s culture and East Asian economics.
Last summer, Kirby said, several hundred Harvard students interned, volunteered or taught English in China. Hundreds more are going this summer.
Kirby, who also chairs Harvard’s academic venture fund for China, said that Harvard’s 2021 decision to move its Mandarin programme out of Beijing was reflective of a natural ebb and flow of leadership and logistical changes, rather than a strategy to refocus away from mainland China.
“These language programmes have a certain half-life,” he said. “None of them last forever in any one entity because it is very demanding on the host.”
Schools beyond the Ivy League are also finding success. Last year, Temple University’s Beasley School of Law began a new student and faculty exchange with North China University of Science and Technology in Hebei province.
John Smagula, the assistant dean of Temple’s law school, cited the Philadelphia public university’s 45 years of collaboration with mainland China as a reason for the programme’s successful launch. “Given this historic mission, Temple plans to stay engaged with our partners in China to foster people-to-people exchange,” he said.
Other US universities are quietly trying to formalise ties with Chinese partners, preferring to stay under the radar to limit political scrutiny.
But according to Simon, partnerships are hard to sustain without the right combination of politics and leadership. “Many private universities can live on their endowments and don’t have to be responsive to state legislatures or the US Congress, but that’s less true of public ones,” he said.
Simon – who left his clinical professor post at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last year due to administrative objections to his China engagements – is concerned that the next generation of university leaders may not have the in-depth knowledge of mainland China necessary to keep things going during tough times ahead.
“Who is the next Denis Simon or Bill Kirby?” he asked.
Kirby was more optimistic.
“Universities are institutions that outlast political moments,” he said. “They even outlast governments.”
For now, American students can look forward to a stronger education push from the Taiwanese government.
“As a small country with a declining population, it is in Taiwan’s best interests to internationalise,” said Wu of the Global Taiwan Institute. “And Taipei believes that the best way to get people to fall in love with Taiwan is to just have them go there.”