Inside Out | Why do so many Chinese study abroad, when local universities are already among the world’s best?

Back in 1973, while a student in Norwich in England, I funded my study by teaching foreign students English.

If I had been more inquisitive and worldly at the time, I would have wondered how it was that, among my students, there were 15 from China sent from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing.

After all, the Cultural Revolution was still being fiercely fought, China’s universities were still locked shut, and the Gang of Four must surely have taken a very dim view of bright young future diplomats being thrown into the lap of the capitalist West to learn English. Someone in the ministry was clearly taking big risks.

From those early, discrete beginnings, the flow of Chinese students overseas has grown into a flood. Last year, more than 600,000 mainland Chinese began study abroad, taking the overall total of the nation’s overseas students to just over 1.5 million, according to Caixin, quoting the Ministry of Education.

Over half of them went to the United States, accounting for over one-third of all foreign students studying there. Almost 90 per cent paid their own costs, with US$11 billion spent in the US.

According to many at the White House and some in the US Senate, most of these are spies, or are in the process of stealing secrets, and many are a threat to national security in the US.