Teaching Chinese Politics in the “New Cold War”: A Survey of Faculty

Abstract

The past decade has been a difficult time to be a scholar of Chinese politics. After Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, opportunities for international collaboration began disappearing, and local interlocutors became increasingly nervous about speaking with foreign researchers. Since 2016, these problems have been compounded by the increasingly tense US–China relationship. Changing attitudes and policies in both countries have hindered those who conduct research on China, work with Chinese collaborators, and recruit Chinese students. The Fulbright Program in China and Hong Kong was closed; National Institutes of Health investigations into foreign influence in US science have caused US-based scientists’ research productivity to decline; and visa restrictions have hindered efforts to recruit Chinese graduate students (Jia et al. 2023). Legal changes in China, including the 2021 Personal Information Protection Law and the 2023 revised Counter-Espionage Law, could be used to target foreign scholars who conduct research in China (Lewis 2023; McCarthy and Gan 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic compounded these challenges in several ways: it caused a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States and created severe pedagogical challenges for those teaching Chinese politics and other courses containing “sensitive” material that could put students—some now physically located in China—at risk (Gueorguiev et al. 2020).