Is Washington misreading Beijing? Decline in US visits to China sparks concern

South China Morning Post | Caroline Lin

Congressional delegations to China fell sharply between 2010 and 2026, and fewer Americans now study there, two think-tank studies show. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that only 32 per cent of the 535 sitting US lawmakers, or 172, have travelled to mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Bilateral tensions deepened in Donald Trump’s first term, and CSIS linked the drop in Taiwan travel to fallout from Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit. The report estimates fewer than 2,000 Americans now study in China, against a 2019 peak of about 11,000. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) analysis, by Rush Doshi, notes the suspension in China of the Fulbright programme and the Critical Language Scholarship. Isabella McCallum, a CSIS co-author, said Congress would rely more on second-hand information. Sun Chenghao of Tsinghua University warned of miscalculation. Xi Jinping has invited 100,000 young Americans to China over five years. Whether that rebuilds expertise remains open.

Comment

Intelligence assessment of China rests on a pipeline that starts years before an analyst reaches a desk or a lawmaker reads a briefing. Students trained in Mandarin and Chinese politics become officers, staffers and academics, and the Fulbright programme and the Critical Language Scholarship supplied some of them. With both suspended in China, fewer people could test a claim about Chinese living standards against primary sources, so verification would weaken first. Congress sits at the receiving end of that chain, and lawmakers without personal reference points have little against which to rank competing briefings.

Washington has met a similar shortage before, and the earlier episode shows how long recovery can take. In the 1950s, loyalty reviews of the McCarthy period ended the Foreign Service careers of John Service and John Paton Davies, both China specialists. The State Department’s China expertise took years to rebuild, and analysts in the interim leaned on China watching from Hong Kong and on outside scholars. Suspended Fulbright and Critical Language Scholarship placements would produce a comparable gap in China expertise, caused by closed access rather than by loyalty boards.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the Fulbright programme and the Critical Language Scholarship stay suspended in China, which weakens US assessment faster: the thinning of language-trained analysts or the fading of first-hand experience in Congress?

My assessment is that the analyst shortfall arrives more slowly but lasts longer. Senator Steve Daines’s August trip to Hangzhou and Guangzhou indicates how quickly a lawmaker can add first-hand experience. A language-trained cadre takes years of study, as the rebuilding after the 1950s dismissals of State Department China specialists suggests.

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