America is running out of China experts

On 23 March 2026, former US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns delivered the opening remarks at the launch of a report on “America’s China Talent Challenge” by the US-China Education Trust Working Group, focusing on reversing the shortage of expertise on China. Burns pointed out that senior American experts who have devoted more than 20 years to studying China are now entering a concentrated period of retirement, while the pipeline of younger scholars has failed to provide an effective replacement. 

As a result, China studies in the US is facing an unprecedented crisis, even showing signs of an academic generational rupture. Meanwhile, the number of American students studying or conducting on-the-ground research in China has plummeted.

According to the report, “Fewer than 2,000 Americans per year are currently estimated to be studying in China, most on short-term undergraduate programs. This is a fraction of the 11,000 U.S. students there in 2019, with an even smaller fraction at the post-graduate level.” 

It warned, “If this trend continues, we believe the United States will face a critical shortage of grounded China expertise within a decade, as today’s specialists with deep in-country experience retire without replacement.” 

At the same time, enrolment in Chinese language courses has also declined, along with the broader downturn in foreign language enrollment in the US over the past several years. One American scholar teaching in Southeast Asia was perplexed by the “retreat of Americans, particularly White Americans, from the study of Asian history”, as stated in his reflective research paper. A leading China specialist Ian Johnson noted that at the study abroad programme where he taught in Beijing, the numbers went from around 120 in 2010 to 30 in 2018. 

In fact, I pointed out several years ago that China studies in the US were already in decline, with talent gradually dwindling. In today’s American academic world, there are no longer prominent figures comparable to John K. Fairbank (1907-1991), Jonathan D. Spence (1936-2021), Joseph R. Levenson (1920-1969) and Fredric Wakeman Jr. (1937-2006) — scholars of enormous influence who trained generations of sinologists. Even the students of Spence have now reached retirement age.

At the same time, the field has also been losing a group of missionary-descended sinologists who were born in China and had a special emotional connection to the country, as they pass away or gradually withdraw from academia. For instance, the leading sinologist, the late C. Martin Wilbur (1907-1997) of Columbia University; Elizabeth Perry of Harvard; and my own adviser, the late Douglas Renolds (1947-2021).

These outstanding scholars born in the 1940s and 1950s typically shared one or more of the following characteristics: first, they were born in China before 1949 and had a strong personal attachment to it. Second, they leaned politically to the left and, during the Cold War — when China was closed and the US was deeply entangled in the Vietnam War — were highly curious about and even sympathetic to Mao-era socialist practices (what American scholars called “high socialism”). Third, after China’s reform and opening up, they entered mainland China to conduct systematic archival research or fieldwork, producing a wealth of scholarship. 

It must be acknowledged that research in the humanities and social sciences often requires long-term emotional investment and intellectual commitment from the scholar. As this older generation of American scholars fades from the academic scene, the younger generation has not only lost emotional ties to China but also any sense of political idealisation. Instead, they face a China that is continuously rising and demonstrating formidable strength in both hard and soft power. The earlier sense of curiosity, sympathy or even condescension has largely disappeared.

Amid an overwhelming media environment, younger students, in my observation, are more likely to experience confusion, anxiety and fear, and to perceive China as a challenge or even a replacement. This could explain why, paradoxically, the more China develops, the fewer American students choose it as a field of study.

American universities, based on their own assessments of US global strategy, have adopted a highly utilitarian approach to studies of areas outside the US. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russian language and Soviet/Russian studies programmes were cut back. More recently, amid intensifying conflicts in the Middle East, academic priorities have shifted from Chinese language and East Asian studies towards Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. As a result, Chinese language programmes were closed and comprehensive China studies were discontinued at some universities. 

In my view, failing to learn Chinese and understand China, and even cutting Chinese language programmes altogether, is a short-sighted, ostrich-like policy that ignores China’s existence, development and fast change. This can only be detrimental to the US itself, bringing no benefit whatsoever and instead deepening its self-imposed isolation. I believe this is precisely what Nicholas Burns and others concerned about the issue should be worried about.

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