Mike Thompson was ready to go to Fulbright-funded Beijing last year to investigate how the Chinese government is recruiting and training its officials.
When the United States suspended all Chinese Fulbright programs in July as part of sanctions over Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its Fulbright program offered him and other Chinese researchers opportunities to relocate to Taiwan. Mr. Thompson, a 30-year-old doctoral student at the University of Michigan, whose first trip to China was in 2009, managed to change his subject to the Taiwan bureaucracy, but was disappointed by the Trump administration’s decision.
“It’s a personal failure for me and a great failure for the US-China relationship,” he said.
The number of American students in China has fallen by more than a fifth since the peak of 2011-2012, according to data released in November by the Institute of International Education. The number of American students in Taiwan increased by almost 55% during the same period.
The change comes amid a deteriorating Washington-Beijing relationship and, according to educators, precedes the Covid-19 pandemic. Interest in studying Chinese on US campuses has cooled, they said.