(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) During Xi Jinping's state visit to the United States last month, he announced at the White House the expansion of China's youth exchange initiative: inviting 100,000 American youths to study and exchange in China in the next five years. “The hope for China-US relations lies in the people, and the future lies in the youth,” Xi Jinping said. According to Fox News, some of the itineraries are fully funded by China, while others require participants to pay for themselves.
This goal is twice the “50,000 people” initiative proposed by Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November 2023. China's official Xinhua News Agency said the target of 50,000 people has been achieved ahead of schedule this year. But according to Forbes, this statistic covers a variety of activities from short-term cultural visits to educational projects, with participants ranging from elementary school students to college students, and cannot be compared with the number of American college students who go to China to earn credits.
There is a serious imbalance in exchanges between Chinese and American students studying abroad
The "Open Door Report" of the American Institute of International Education shows that in the 2023-2024 academic year, only 1,749 American students are taking credit courses in China. That's up from 469 the previous school year, but still well below the 11,639 in the 2018-2019 school year.
At the same time, there are 265,919 Chinese students studying in American colleges and universities in the 2024-2025 school year.
According to the Straits Times, Sun Chenghao, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and Security Studies at Tsinghua University, believes that this gap has both political and structural reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted programs, and geopolitical tensions, security concerns and funding cuts have further discouraged American students. A 2026 report from the U.S.-China Education Trust also found that Americans “generally believe” that studying in China affects future government security clearances. U.S. government-funded programs such as Fulbright, Bolen Scholarships, and Critical Language Scholarships have successively suspended their activities in mainland China.
Supporters: The United States urgently needs a new generation of China Communications
Denis Simon, former executive vice president of Duke Kunshan University, wrote an article in University World News, believing that Xi Jinping’s proposal is in line with the interests of the United States. He wrote that the United States needs a generation of China observers who have actually lived on the ground. Some of these students will go on to become scientists, diplomats, journalists, investors, and members of Congress—the kind of professionals that Washington is currently short of.
American political scientist Rush Doshi and Executive Director of the US-China Educational Trust Rosie Levine also wrote an article on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, stating that the United States needs a "much deeper reserve of China experts" and called for the resumption of programs such as Fulbright, while requiring both countries to ensure at the highest level that participants will not be exposed to undue risks from China's security agencies.
Critics: Indoctrination, Hostage Risk and United Front Channels
Opposition was equally strong. Fox News reported that Daniel Di Martino, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, believed that the program was "clearly intended" to indoctrinate young Americans. Isaac Stone Fish, chief executive of Strategic Ventures, warned that students "could effectively become hostages" if relations between the two countries become tense.
According to Just the News, John Moolenaar, chairman of the House of Representatives Special Committee on U.S.-China Strategic Competition, pointed out in a letter to local school districts that the China International Education Exchange Association, which is responsible for implementing such exchange projects, is associated with the Chinese Communist Party’s united front system and that the relevant visits are propaganda and influence operations.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, said in a podcast that he hopes Americans can go to China to learn Chinese and get in touch with ordinary Chinese, but the problem is "what kind of China" Beijing allows them to see. He denounced Beijing's claim that the 50,000-person target has been reached as a "bald lie" and asked based on the standard of reciprocal communication: Chinese students at Harvard can freely criticize the US president, but can American students at Tsinghua openly organize activities against the rule of the Chinese Communist Party?
Beijing’s intentions and unanswered security questions
The Straits Times quoted Kevin Chen, an associate researcher at the US Program at Nanyang Technological University's S. S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, as saying that winning over American youth is "low-hanging fruit" for Beijing, and Beijing is likely hoping to cultivate a generation of Americans who are more sympathetic to China's views. However, he believes that for students to go to China in person and draw their own conclusions, the overall benefits outweigh the disadvantages; if the funding is changed to the United States, it can also reduce the doubts of the outside world.
In 2024, more than 20 students from Muscatine High School in Iowa became the first batch of American students invited to visit China, and the trip was fully funded by the Chinese government. Months later, at least one Iowa lawmaker called for the follow-up visit to be canceled, citing the potential for such visits to be used for political propaganda.
According to the Straits Times, when Xi Jinping issued the invitation, he did not publicly guarantee that participants would not be exposed to undue risks from Chinese security agencies, and the minutes of the talks between China and the United States did not mention safeguards for American students. Sun Chenghao suggested that all parties should agree in advance on academic expectations, data acquisition, data protection and consular assistance.
"Forbes" pointed out that in 2009, Obama proposed the goal of sending 100,000 American students to China within four years. The following year, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially launched the "100,000 Strong" plan in Beijing. Now Beijing is extending an invitation in turn. The report believes that the key to measuring success or failure may not be the number of people, but what these young people bring back from China.
