Understanding China: Changing The (Side) Channel

Proponents of studying in China argue that it’s key to “understanding” the country. They say less about what specifically we need to understand — or why. In fact, the kind of insight that will help the United States outcompete the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not necessarily require substantial time there. The real key is a devotion to uncovering truths that the CCP doesn’t want exposed. 

CCP ruler Xi Jinping has turned China into an intelligence state where, as the former British intelligence director Nigel Inkster points out, “protecting secrets” from “possible spies” is “an all-of-nation undertaking” and “even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats.” This makes independent research harder than ever to pursue in China. Given the revolution in sensors and data, however, it is perhaps easier than ever to execute remotely. 

Are there still topics for which time in-country matters, and is it possible to look around and see things the CCP would prefer stayed hidden? Yes on both counts, of course. But the idea that important knowledge can come only through visits supervised by the CCP, as all exchanges these days are, is a fiction purveyed by apparatchiks from Xi on down. The con has not only survived but thrived, due to the mismatch in aims of the private citizens on the US side of exchanges and the CCP on the Chinese side.

While Americans see language learning or cross-cultural experience as the goal of studying abroad, the CCP’s internal discussions reveal motivations that are much less about personal fulfillment — and from a strategic perspective, much less benign. As the New Zealand-based scholar Anne-Marie Brady explains, from Beijing’s perspective foreign visitors, including students, are fodder for a longstanding effort to “make the foreign serve China.” During the Cold War, the CCP evolved a sophisticated apparatus to fracture and bypass the Western blockade it faced through outreach to individuals and firms abroad under the cover of an unofficial people-to-people side channel.

Unsurprisingly in light of this history, Xi Jinping now sees increasing youth people-to-people exchanges as a way of impeding burgeoning efforts by the United States to revive and update Cold War-era export controls, research security measures, and the like. In 2023 he set out to recruit 50,000 American students in 5 years and has often stated — most recently last week — that China-US youth exchanges “enhance mutual understanding,” “build bridges,” and/or yield “envoys of friendship.” The Chinese phrases are not the empty platitudes they sound like in English, but rather refer to united front work, meaning that the CCP uses these exchanges to co-opt and exploit non-party members for intelligence and political warfare purposes. Which explains why united front organizations themselves are often the hosts or sponsors of US student groups.

A Chinese-language annual report on youth exchanges published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) last year highlights that students are especially “open-minded and curious” (read: gullible) and that Chinese Americans are particularly attractive because they “often attend top-tier American high schools, have excellent academic records, and possess dual cultural backgrounds, enabling them to act as bridges in cross-cultural exchanges.” While this sounds harmless, again, to “act as a bridge” is a technical term in the world of united front work, and the report specifies that these youths can help “strengthen” China’s “voice in global governance” while attracting technology and “high-end, precision, cutting-edge supply chains.” In other words, American children, and particularly those of Chinese descent, are being targeted for zero-sum, strategic ends.

The China “experts” filling delegation after delegation have not kept us from becoming dependent on the CCP for essential medicines and economic inputs such as critical minerals, commodity chips, and the like, nor kept our institutions from being suffused with CCP money and influence agents. On the contrary, many “experts” have encouraged this integration – perhaps out of ignorance or naivete, or maybe because sounding a warning would endanger their next invitation to enjoy Chinese hospitality. 

Good luck finding a frequent China visitor who will even mention the united front publicly, much less expose its role in exchanges. Meanwhile, foreigners in China are pressured to accept the party’s censorship and propaganda, and students are encouraged to participate in ritual displays of obeisance to the CCP. By normalizing all this, four decades of compliant engagement have reduced America’s margin of advantage while arming Beijing with dangerous leverage over the United States.

US strategy vis-a-vis China does need to be informed in part by dynamics such as Chinese public sentiment that are easiest to grasp locally. But over the past decade, much of the most important research for US policy – exposing the PLA’s massive buildup, the Uyghur genocide, and united front operations – has been based on inputs other than field work in China, and was produced by people who likely cannot visit or return to the mainland without risking detention. 

Former State Department China advisor Miles Yu nails the situation: “A dictatorship that spends enormous resources censoring information, imprisoning critics, rewriting history, and operating a gigantic propaganda apparatus is telling us something important. Truth and transparency are vulnerabilities of the regime.” 

Americans studying in CCP-ruled China in 2026 are unlikely to find, or be able to impose, transparency on any topic of serious importance. We are already blessed with more than enough conduits for the kind of “understanding” the CCP wants us to have – in order to defeat us. It remains to be seen if we can generate enough of the other kind to avoid that result.

Jacqueline Deal is Co-founder of the American Academy for Strategic Education, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Advisor to State Armor.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.