Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. This is Jeremiah Jenny, broadcasting from over here in Europe, calling back to the old country where I am joined by both David Moser, my illustrious, well-traveled co-host, coming in from the Third Ring Road. How are you doing, David? Pretty good. Beautiful weather in Beijing. My wife and I are walking around in a foreign family, husband, wife, and kid situation.
were walking up to us, obviously wanting to ask directions. And I thought probably the kid would ask me, and instead he asked my wife in fluent, our very good Mandarin. I'm not sure why, maybe he wanted to just show off. And then we learned, yes, the kid had been studying Mandarin in international schools and was taking them around as a guide.
So that was kind of nice, very encouraging to see kids of that age already up to date, you know, speaking Mandarin. It's great. Gave me a sense of optimism for the future. Sense of optimism, a sense of purpose, the idea that our life and careers haven't been utterly wasted. Exactly.
There we go. I might edit that part out. And with us as well, also based in Beijing, but currently on a southern tour to the city of Guangzhou, Carlos Rock Pelnis, originally from Latvia. Carlos first started studying Chinese while he was doing an undergraduate degree in the U.S., went to China as an exchange student for a program called IES Abroad for the first time in 2006, earned a doctoral degree in ethnoecology from Minzu University of China and
and taught and managed American study abroad programs in China and the rest of Asia for over a decade. Starting this spring, however, Carlos is now the China country representative at the European Union's, and yes, folks, this is how it's pronounced, Euraxis Research Mobility Initiative. Welcome to the pod, Carlos. Good evening. We've been talking on the podcast this summer about the future, really, of studying in China,
What things look like on the ground for those who are either working, researching, learning the language? And Carlos, you've been working in the study abroad field, international education for over a decade. You were a foreign exchange student yourself. Tell us from your perspective, what do you see that's changed? Or from your perspective, what do you see that is happening on the ground that could affect the next generation of China scholars?
You know, I showed up in Beijing as an exchange student.
And well, you didn't, Jeremiah, you didn't teach me when I was a student, but you came into the study abroad program where I was studying just a few years later. And sort of, I guess, as the generation before me working in study abroad, and then David is probably the generation before you. I think David's probably started off seeing gradual uptick. You were there when things
Things were going the wildest. And then I have had the pleasure of watching things speed around and dwindle until, of course, we had COVID where everything was on complete hold. I actually had a very interesting experience at that time working with Chinese students of American universities who were stuck in China. And therefore, their colleges decided that they need to have a little bit of America involved.
within China, and I worked with a group of colleagues setting up a college, or not a college, but a program of studying in an American university, a little America within the city of Shanghai. But with that little blip, when I at some point had more than a thousand students under my tutelage, other than that, the last decade has been very steady decline in number of students coming
for a short-term exchange or something, let's say a year or less. There has been some changes in people coming for longer studies. We've seen the creation of a few kind of prominent China or study in China programs in universities in Beijing. And we've seen quite a few graduate or master's and PhD students. And those numbers, I think, are probably going up.
especially in the top universities in Beijing. But yeah, the exchange field has really hit a major storm and now is completely under ox. Carlos, Jeremiah and I tend to be very Americocentric being Yankees. And I know you can't probably speak for all of Europe, but I'm wondering if you have some impressions about the differences and perhaps the reasons why students, the student numbers have been falling all across Europe. If there are some differences in the reason for that
If maybe some countries have kept abreast of the matter and other countries have gotten worse, I'd just like to know if you have an overall portrait of other countries besides the United States in the sense of this deteriorating student participation in China. Overall, I think that the European studying in China and also, well, studying of China, the trend is probably very similar of a peak that coincided roughly around
the Olympics, the first of the Olympics that we had in Beijing. But I think that the kind of the curve is much more spread out. The numbers were higher earlier on. Exchanges that have been happening with a variety of institutions and universities in Europe. First of all, you have the difference between East and West. Of course, the exchanges between Eastern Europe and China started way earlier.
the kind of essentially economic
change, driven changes that you get in the 90s and later on, you definitely had a fairly quicker start and people coming in to study language, but also then tagging along with the European companies coming into China. And then, yes, of course, there was the coming out party that Beijing threw for the world in 2008. And I think that for the European student
presence in China. Perhaps the peak lasted a little longer, and then the reduction that has happened right before COVID was not quite a steep drop, partially because you have many, many institutions that
have direct exchanges with China. I mean, the U.S. education institutions are either they come in with a really well-resourced study program and, you know, there's a whole bunch of very well-resourced American university offices in China
Beijing that run their own thing or they come in with the third party study abroad providers that we've seen that all of us have worked in. The Europeans for the most part these are university to university exchanges
Oftentimes, the universities, well, let's be honest, they don't really pamper the students back at home and they don't do that when they come to Beijing. The programs tend to be much smaller. Usually, the students are more involved, more integrated with the local university students. They are, even if they are within Beijing,
But then the university's foreign student departments, they're much less in a cocoon for just their own little community. And then once things started petering out again, these are separate, very, very many different, usually fairly small-sized university connections that have
has taken a little longer to get reduced. In the end of the day, again, the pattern is the same. You get less interest in studying Chinese, less interest in coming to China. Jumping on David's question too, one of the headwinds, if you will, to getting students to China from the United States has been a rise in Sinophobia or a change in feelings in America towards China. There's a lot of
political rhetoric, particularly on the right, but not a small amount from the left as well, that tends to really be very critical of China, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes just for sport, sometimes for no reason at all. But taking a look, as you said, in Europe, there's a slightly different system for students going abroad. And to echo David's caution that we're not asking you to speak for an entire continent
But do you see any similar issues in Europe or are there different reasons why we've seen a trailing off of these kind of exchange programs for European students going to Czechoslovakia? Well, again, the general trajectory is very similar. The European...
approach to China as in, you know, politically has been quite different in words between, you know, what Europe says and what America says. But there is a strong concern about sort of overall changes in
in China at a political level. And it does reflect a kind of, I guess, bottomed up view in Europe that there are things to be worried about in China, right? At the same time, think that, first of all, the rhetoric is less intense. It's more measured. And of course, then you have a Europe is not a country. So as much as
Everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people want to be speaking for Europe. There is also very clearly competition about who gets to talk on behalf of Europe. And there are more people you can trade horses with from the Chinese side. And so overall, you don't get this kind of harsh competition.
rhetoric about China. And then with regards to the student response to these changes in China and to perhaps response to rhetoric about China, my sense is that there is less fear, but there lack of interest. And that's, I think, really what we need to recognize that as much as there is a fair amount of fear and concern, the other side of the same issue is just a reduction in interest
I mean, we have to keep in mind that in the last decade, if you take Asia as a region for exchange and for study, the rest of Asia has been going up. It's China that's going down. And that concerned us as educators greatly.
It exists in America, but it also has very much the same situation in Europe. And I think that's really the huge similarity is this reduction in interest. I have a question about the difference in the type of student that comes from Europe and the type of student that might come from the United States. So we've talked a lot about the difference that you could characterize as we characterize these American students coming here.
to China to be part of a sort of China studies format, which is, you know, sort of a sort of a topics and things you can associate with China and sort of based upon mostly humanities, not a lot of heavy duty history and so forth. Whereas Europe tends to be under this rubric more of sinology, a more serious sort of academic subject.
kind of flavor to it. And it was interesting to me that you said that mostly, that more of the European exchange programs are university to university, whereas the programs that I guess Jeremiah and I both work for and the kinds of, which did involve universities, by the way, but they were through this third party
That would be the intermediary. So that seems to me to suggest two very different kinds of students. Is there any phenomena there to be looked at that the actual European students come at China in a very different way and therefore their investment is a little more less fleeting, more permanent, more flexible?
career-based and academic. Is that right? Or how would you characterize the difference, if there is a difference? Well, there is a difference in how the education systems are set up, you know, and how essentially your investment into your education is driven by essentially how much you pay for your education, right? I think that that's a big difference in just how you think about your education, whether you're paying
whatever it is these days that you pay in the states for an undergraduate it's like what 80 000 us dollars a year or you go to a free university in in um somewhere in germany i think that all three of us are probably a little biased because we've spent our time in the sort of the university belt of beijing and that is where the hardcore european sinologists show up right so you
You find an occasional German person who is 21 and reads classical Chinese. I think if you went to Shanghai or even here in Guangzhou, you would find that a lot of the European students, for sure, are here for a much different set of reasons. There's a lot of business exchange programs going into various parts of China. There's a lot of training programs
programs that have been driven by essentially curriculum that's set up to train the students to become let's say autoworkers autoworkers the german training system includes a lot of exchanges going to the places where these cars are made and and there's a lot of german cars that until today are being made in china we'll see how long that lasts but but that's you know that
that there definitely has been an educational system and system of exchanges that has been built around that. So whether the Europeans that come to China are more, therefore, you know, better prepared for what they will learn here, whether it's sinology or car making, I don't know. I think that there's, you'll still find that same level of exploration that you see in the American China studies model that we are familiar with, right, where you come in with,
either a fair amount of
preparation or perhaps very little China background, and then you do this semester of China exploration, or you come from a technical school anywhere in Europe or somewhere else. Yeah, I'm not sure that you'll really find that much of a difference at the end in where the career takes these people. One of the issues that we've talked about in this podcast, and it's an issue that we've started to see a little bit, an issue that people have been writing about quite a bit this summer and this fall, involves
Who criticizes China? Who gets to criticize China and
And/or how should we as non-Chinese approach China in all of its glorious messiness and complexity? We've seen books this summer. They were published by Peter Hessler. Jeff Wasserstrom, who's a professor of history at University of California, Irvine, is a very well-known public intellectual who writes about China, just wrote an excellent essay about Tim Walz and China and the question of, should people go to China?
And he reflects in this article about how, as an American academic, he has chosen not to go to China, at least at his stage in his career, because of issues that he has with the way China is going today. I am very curious about, again, that perspective coming out of Europe. And is there a difference? We talked about how there's a wide range of views, but is there a difference between
in how the EU might approach China on specific issues. And here's the issue I'm thinking of. In the U.S. has been a lot of criticism of China and China's support, tacit or otherwise, for Russia during the war in Ukraine.
But I wonder if this looks very different from a European perspective. In the U.S., I sometimes think it's kind of a spectator sport. We want the guy that we don't like to lose. Or if you're Donald Trump, we want the guy who has pictures of you in a hotel room to win, whatever that may be. But in Europe, this is a much more visceral thing, and particularly if you're coming from a region of Europe like the Baltic states, who have their own history with Russia.
Let me think about this. The question is, you're asking, are the Europeans concerned about to go or not to go? That question? Yeah. Or I should say, are they concerned about to go or not to go? And if they choose not to go, is it coming from the same place that we're seeing a lot of American academics choosing not to go? The last five years have been...
very challenging in terms of where Europe and China finds itself in a sort of game of ping-pong between, well, between what happened with COVID and then right after the crisis that was, that exploded with the second phase, the active phase of war in Ukraine. The European political response, of course, has been very loud in support of Ukraine. And yet when it comes to, to
exchanges with China, those have not stopped or they haven't been interacting with China. They have been taking any opportunity that comes up to engage and maintain dialogue despite a very clear concern that China's support for Russia is very substantial. On a
more kind of private level, I think that you will, I'm not seeing, I might not just notice, but I'm not seeing as strong a sort of back and forth of whether anyone on an individual level should choose to come or not to, especially those who have the opportunity to choose. I mean, there are some people who can't come, right?
but those who have to make this decision, this choice, I don't think I have been noticing any ongoing sort of get back and forth on this. My sense is that people are overall maintaining engagement where it is needed and where it's possible. But as I said earlier about education,
the interest and the level of sort of general interest is definitely down. And so I think that people might choose those who do not have the sort of need to make that choice.
don't bother to think about it. So very interestingly, of course, China has made this really significant effort to attract tourists coming in from Europe. So most of the countries that have new visa-free, unilateral visa-free access to Europe, I mean, access to China, these are European countries. So some of the more recent announcements were just reinstating previously existing arrangements, but the new ones are mostly from Europe. And we're seeing increase in...
people showing up in China for those 15 days. But my impression is that still it's not anywhere close to what you would have seen if this had happened five years ago. So the interest has been reduced significantly. As an American involved in China, I'm sort of aware when I'm here in China with people from different nationalities that there's something special about
the American and Chinese relationship, the U.S.-China relationship, that makes us feel like a sense of urgency that if we don't get this right, then it may be more consequential than a relationship, Chinese relationship, some other country, especially one that's not a superpower relationship.
So, I mean, that's kind of the sort of rhetoric. We had a meeting, I guess it was last two summers ago or yeah, two summers ago at just an expats residence where we had the U.S. ambassador, Nicholas Burns, there talking to some expats. And it was, no, it was, when was it? Because it was during the balloon incident. Remember the balloon that flew over North America, right?
And Ambassador Burns was saying, you know, we were so lucky to have the sage, wise advice of an Orville Schell and a Susan Shirk during that diplomatic crisis. And I think I sort of raised my hand and I said,
That's wonderful. But where are the new Susan Shirk and Orville Schell going to come from? Because we had already missed five years of a burgeoning generation of young scholars here that could become the next Susan Shirk or Orville Schell. So I'm wondering if it's a little bit different in Europe, because I don't imagine...
with some exceptions, maybe Germany, maybe certain countries, but is there a different sense in Europe of the importance of getting the China relationship correct? There doesn't seem to be the geopolitical burden there, a sense of urgency, and that might have some difference in the way the reasons people go to China or the reasons that Europeans invest in China, maybe for different reasons that Americans have with a sort of sense of historical urgency. And the manifest...
Manifest destiny. The manifest destiny of America sorting out China. Right, exactly. Every single undergraduate is told during their first week in Beijing that...
that. Right. It is, you know, depending on the decade, but something is really important that they're here for a very important reason. Well, I think that, yeah, well, the rhetoric is definitely different. I think that for a lot of, you know, today, China is very, very significant trade partner for a lot of the countries in the EU. It's the biggest trade partner outside of fellow EU countries. There are
You know, there are so many ways that the Chinese economy or the Chinese this, that, the other thing affects people. So there is a, there's definitely a shared sense of this is important. I think that's, that's very similar. But,
Yeah, I don't think it's a burden in the same sense. Although, you know, probably there are now a whole bunch of Germans coming here trying to learn about cars so that they can hope to have a next generation of cars in China, back at home, that will be competitive. But that kind of burden is, I guess, probably possible and is something that people come in to make the best of the bilateral relationship with China. And then, of course, there isn't, you know, the EU...
is an entity that is, if you look at it as one big body, it's a really, if you're 20, you don't really get, I don't know, there isn't really an embodied responsibility for the EU-China relationship the same way that you might get if you go to an elite school in the US. I wonder, part of that is this question,
This goes back to the missionary days, this idea that the U.S. has this responsibility and this special relationship and that they're going to lead China into the future. And of course, that particular construction has proven elusive, chimerical, comical generation after generation, from missionaries to democracy activists to human rights campaigners of
I mean, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with human rights and democracy, but I think it's important that China will change on China's terms. And the idea that, you know, we Americans who show up are going to somehow be an integral part of that change is a little bit of, you know, man of destiny or hubris. But then again, of course, you know, Sun Yat-sen spent
a good chunk of time, not just in Japan, but also in Hawaii. The connections that exist between states and China are very, very significant. So it's good that people take them seriously. Carlos, I have a quick question. Can you just briefly tell us what motivated you to get involved in China? Can you tell us in a few words? I started studying Chinese because it was, well, I had to take a language. I went to a liberal arts college and I had to take a language. And
the options were German, Spanish, French. And I hadn't studied those before. And I was like, not going to do German in, you know, rural America. So then the other option was Chinese or Japanese. And so I decided to try Chinese just to, you know, fulfill the language requirement. And then I came, yeah, I went to China for the first time and loved it. And then I went there again and again and again. So I started out of a
of a sort of a adventure, linguistic adventure, and then learned a lot of things through it and enjoyed that learning process. Well, I think it's been great too, Carlos, the way you've able to take, even if it was a, it's not going to be German, it must be Chinese, to take what became perhaps a spur of the moment decision, it became a career. And the way you've shared that with so many students over the years,
Before we go, I do have one of my favorite Carlos stories among a few of them. Carlos and I worked together at a study abroad program and we
shared many adventures, but one of them was taking a group of students on a trip up to what's today Dongbei, the northeast end to the border of Russia, where there's kind of like a Chinese version of Tijuana, where Mongolia and Russia and China come together, a place called Manzhouli. And Carlos was working for our program at the time, and he came along with the students in large part, of course, because Carlos speaks Russian, and that's a very useful language in that area. But many people who know Carlos will know that he's also a vegetarian.
And there was a barbecue that was being held on the steppe in Inner Mongolia in which the idea was that you would get a sheep and to execute the sheep, you unplug the sheep. I'm not going to go too much into how this works, but basically an incision is made, you unplug the carotid artery and the sheep falls over and it's supposed to be relatively humane. In this particular instance, though, in front of about 20 assembled American undergraduates, our Mongolian hosts missed their mark.
And so it became less an issue of unplugging the sheep and more trying to decapitate the sheep with a large knife. And Carlos, who was committed not only to China education, but to environmental activism and vegetarianism, was heard walking up and down the assembled students going,
Any converts, any converts, any converts. Carlos, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. We hope to get you back and good luck with the new position at Uraxis. The pleasure is all mine.
We should go out to Inner Mongolia soon again. Actually, do you know the one country that I've not been to in Asia is Outer Mongolia. I somehow missed that window. I know. Everything about Outer Mongolia says I would like it there. It was one of those things where I never was ever able to put together the trip and the plan to get Outer Mongolia. I went to Inner Mongolia many times, but not the Outer one. So maybe that's a good place to meet because then I don't need to get a Chinese visa. It's good. I don't
Outer Mongolia is good. It's, well, I mean, you know, I have low standards in terms of, no, no, I have high standards for many things. Cultural experience is one of those. They actually have really, there's a really good fast food chain called Modern Nomads that they have in Ulaanbaatar. They do good, many things, including vegetarian food, but the rest of it is lamb. You should go.
That's important because most people, when they think of Mongolian cuisine, find vegetarian versions is not always one of them. Actually, one of the, probably the best Italian vegan restaurant I've been to was Ulaanbaatar of all places. Well, check that out. If you're ever in the Ulaanbaatar region and feeling the need for some vegetarian Italian food, recommendations are available. David, thank you again for calling in at night. My pleasure.
Sure. And good luck on this next semester, too. Have you started yet? I think I asked you that last time. Yeah, already started. And the students have discovered that I've been on TV a few times. And so I've actually signed a few autographs in the class. They don't know what I'm doing. They just think it's anybody who's done anything but teach is probably worthy of admiration, I guess. Do people in the current student generation like
They watch TV. I mean, they know what a TV is. Does it matter? No, no, no. They just search it on the internet. No, they don't watch TV. And they...
and i think they're more just interested like oh you play music and they don't care what kind of music you play you're just music that gives you points keep in mind the teachers there are well i don't want to say anything bad about the teachers there but they're not exactly the most you know socially uninhibited and outrageous they're pretty staid staid proper conservative people who just teach the class i tend to get way off base and go off in tangents and they like that well the
Give us an update after you have your first faculty party and banquet and just see how stayed and calm they are behind closed doors. Maybe so. Yeah, a little baijiu.
My experience working at Chinese universities is the most quiet, serious, and by-the-book academics were usually the ones first to take their shirts off in the karaoke room. So, you know, thank you all for listening. Join us again for another edition of Barbarian to the Gate. You can find us on all those platforms that host podcasts. Think at this point, we'll just cue the drums.