Public Diplomacy: International Exchanges: National Weapon vs. Universal Understanding?

The below article by a well-meaning but somewhat naive American boarding school teacher poses key questions about USG-funded/approved "international exchanges."

The questions, to simplify:

• Are USG-sponsored exchanges a weapon "we" (the USA directly or indirectly through overseas NGOs funded by USG funds) use to undermine, through so-called "soft power," political/social systems abroad "we" don't like?

• Or are these exchanges a means of non-power-politics intended for "international understanding" among "diverse" social/political entities, the kind of universal empathy identified with, ironically enough, a segregationist Senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, the founder of a program in 1946 that bears his name).

I suppose they are a mixture of both. Maybe Hegel (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), were he still alive (and comprehensible) could resolve this issue from a philosophical perspective.

Image from

Below the article:

Seeds of Chinese Liberalization, Made in America: Studying in the U.S., then going home by the hundreds of thousands bearing Western ideas.

By FRED ZILIAN, Wall Street Journal

Right here in our cozy, conservative boarding school in New England, we are unconsciously and with no malicious intent sowing the seeds of revolution in China. Chinese students coming to the United States for secondary and undergraduate education are learning—through their formal education in American classrooms and through osmosis at corner coffee shops—liberal political ideas and critical-thinking skills that may in the long run help to destabilize the Chinese political system. These students, who will soon be part of the next generation of adults in China, could prove in the long run a more insidious force to the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army than the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

The Chinese discovered our New England boarding school only recently. Five years ago we had three Chinese students; four years ago we had 11; then 19; then 26. This year we have 32. Our experience reflects a national phenomenon. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, only 65 Chinese students attended U.S. private high schools in academic year 2005-06. In 2010-11 the number had grown to 6,725. Chinese attendance at U.S. colleges is also booming. In 2011, 157,588 Chinese students attended college here, a 23% increase from the prior year.

The Chinese students at our school are not only among our best students, they are also among our best citizens. They run and are elected to class office, they apply for the Model United Nations Club and—thank heavens—they play musical instruments and sing. Our choir and orchestra would be seriously weakened without their presence.

Sometimes they stun us with their knowledge of American culture. One of our Chinese students was the only child in a class who could identify the "Huckleberry Finn" character known as "the duke"; another was the only one who could quote the final line in the movie "Gone with the Wind."

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, one of the pre-eminent existential questions facing China has been: Can the Chinese accomplish what the Soviets could not—liberalize economically while maintaining an illiberal political system? The Chinese Communist Party reigns over 1.4 billion people with power concentrated in its 25-member Politburo. There are no genuinely free elections, no legal parties beside the Communist Party, and few guarantees of political rights. Whereas soldiers in Western armies swear to defend such things as the nation and the country's constitution, Chinese soldiers swear first their loyalty to the Communist Party.

My Chinese professor friend has told me that the Chinese people are used to following an emperor or strong man. Until 1911 the leader was an emperor or empress, from 1949-76 it was Mao Zedong. But that was the old China. Because of the tremendous double-digit growth China has realized during the past two decades, the country's middle class has grown to more than 300 million today from under 100 million.

It is a good bet that these people will eventually shift their focus from rudimentary physical and security needs to self-expression values such as freedom of speech and assembly, representative government, and free and fair elections—the values of the Enlightenment that destabilized so many Western countries where power had been concentrated in a monarchy or aristocracy. History is replete with the inexorable spread of a powerful idea or art form.

I asked some of our Chinese students after graduation what they believe they had obtained at our boarding school that their friends in China had not. More practical knowledge, said one.

"Here we have a lot of chances to apply the knowledge we have learned to see if we really understand them, such as essays and labs. These are very good ways to develop independent thinking as well."

Another emphasized the confidence in herself that she developed. If she had not come to our school, she "wouldn't have become this strong person." These students have tasted freedom of thought and have been educated to think independently and critically. As adults they will not easily be made to kowtow to anyone or to any political system that suppresses their freedoms.

Not Mycenaean warriors hiding in a wooden horse but Han students speaking native Mandarin—and excellent English—will return to China after their sojourns in America, carrying not weapons but liberal political ideas and critical-thinking skills. These students, combined with the masses of the new middle class, may prove to be a revolutionary cocktail for Chinese society. Call it the Han Spring.

Mr. Zilian has been a history teacher and the international student adviser at a New England boarding school for 20 years.