The multitudes of Chinese students attending US universities are approaching college as less of a life experience and more as a transaction, educators worry, leading to measures to help them integrate — including broadcasting football games in Mandarin and giving them orientation before they even leave Asia.
While students of similar backgrounds naturally flock together anywhere, the integration question is being discussed with urgency in relation to Chinese students because of their sheer numbers. On US campuses, where they number in the hundreds or thousands, it is easier for them to find friends who speak the same native language and form insular communities.
The experience of Yang Anyi, a 19-year-old University of Connecticut sophomore from Beijing, reflects some of the challenges.
When she arrived in the US, it was a member of a Chinese student group who picked her up at the airport. An applied mathematics major, she has gotten to know some of her US peers through coursework and she cheered alongside them as she watched a broadcast of the women’s basketball team winning a national championship, but she spends nearly all her free time with Chinese friends. She had expected Americans to be more welcoming.
“They are friendly, but some I thought would be more interested in talking to me,” Yang said. “Actually, they seldom speak to me if I don’t speak to them.”
Where administrators and analysts of US-China relations see missed opportunities for exchange, some professors also see a disconnect affecting their classrooms as Chinese students, in general, participate less in discussions.
“They like to stay with each other and it’s getting the attention of a lot of our professors,” said Rong Yuhang, an assistant vice provost for global affairs at UConn, which counts more than 300 students from China in its freshman class.
The number of students China sends to the US jumped to 274,439 in the 2013-2014 school year from 61,765 a decade earlier, according to the Institute of International Education. Graduate students account for the biggest group, but undergraduates have been gaining quickly.
Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, said some of today’s students have a different attitude from the Chinese pioneers of the 1980s and 1990s.
“There’s not a sense of coming to America, like an older generation, so much as buying a credential to get a better job,” Daly said.
At Big Ten public universities, which began a big recruiting push in China several years ago, the integration of Chinese students has become such a pressing issue in the past couple of years that they now hold regular summits to discuss strategies.
The University of Illinois, which enrolls nearly 5,000 Chinese students on a campus of about 44,000, began holding “Football 101” clinics a couple years ago and introduced Mandarin-language broadcasts this fall.
Mike Waddell, a senior associated director of athletics, said he has seen the students at games listening to the broadcasts through their smartphones.
“It’s such a big part of the Big Ten culture that we wanted to make sure we reached out to students and made them feel very welcome,” Waddell said.
At Purdue, one of several schools that now hold orientation sessions in Chinese cities, Michael Brzezinski, the dean of international programs, said officials begin stressing to incoming students before they arrive the importance of engaging with other students.
Many schools are also working with domestic students and faculty to help make Chinese students more comfortable.
Purdue prods student groups to do more with international student groups by offering additional money for joint events and it is trying to create training programs for students on intercultural competence. UConn, likewise, is having discussions on expectations of “global competencies.”
Kevin Zhuang, a UConn student from Shanghai, said the biggest challenge for most students is the language barrier. The campus experience, he said, really depends on the student.
“We have some Chinese students who are really outgoing, who have a lot of American friends,” he said. “We also see people who stay at home all day, and just hang out with Chinese and don’t want to speak English at all.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing