“The concern (in the United States) is that Chinese young people, including students studying at American universities, are primarily brainwashed nationalists and weapons used by the CPC to undermine U.S. power and interests,” Cheng Li wrote in the introductory chapter — China’s Millennials: Navigating Socioeconomic Diversity and Disparity in a Digital Era — in the new book “China’s Youth: Increasing Diversity amid Persistent Inequality” (Brookings Institution Press, 2021).
As director of John L. Thornton China Center under The Brookings Institution, Cheng Li believes that Washington has alienated Young Chinese, and thus loses the leverage in influencing China’s future.
He mentioned that the world views of Chinese young people, including their attitudes toward the U.S., have changed profoundly in recent years. And nationalism and anti-American sentiment are particularly evident among young Chinese, including those who have previously studied or are currently studying in the United States. As political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss of Cornell University recently observed, young Chinese people today are “more hawkish in their foreign policy beliefs than older generations.”
In as early as 2018, a Chinese survey found that 90 percent of the post-1990s cohort expressed resentment over “prejudices” in the West about China. That same year, another survey of 10,000 young Chinese who were born in or after 2000 found that 80 percent believed that “China was either in the best era in its history or was becoming a better country each day.”
And a nationwide survey of 17,000 college students conducted in the spring of 2020 found that the recent tensions between China and the U.S. — including the trade war and the Meng Wanzhou incident — have drastically enhanced interest in geopolitics among Chinese college students and promoted growing nationalistic sentiment. A significant number of Chinese students have still chosen to study in the U.S., and during the summer of 2021 about 85,000 Chinese nationals obtained student visas to study in the U.S. But the proportion of total Chinese students in the U.S. began declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic.