Are Chinese students in the US a national security threat, or an economic benefit to both countries?

David Dodwell says the many Chinese students studying abroad were putting Apec’s ‘earn, learn, return’ model into practice – then US ideologues saw something more sinister at play

David Dodwell

Published: 3:00am, 9 Feb 2019

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For more than eight patient years, Doris Ho, one of the Philippines’ most respected members of the Apec Business Advisory Council, worked tirelessly to eliminate barriers to the movement of working people around our Apec region.

Her legacy was captured in the idea of “Earn, Learn, Return”. The idea was radical, and fundamentally at odds with existing Western ideas about international labour mobility. It was radical because it had absolutely nothing to do with the politically toxic problems in many countries linked with migration.

Existing labour mobility policies were built around the idea of a government recognising that it had labour or skills shortages that could not be met from within its own economy. In response, “points” systems were created that offered people with the right skills the chance to immigrate, become full citizens and settle permanently.

But locals have often risen up in opposition, making the “immigration” issue the toxic one it is today, not just across Europe or Donald Trump’s United States, but in Canada, Australia and other rich economies around the world.

Ho’s “Earn, Learn, Return” started from a wholly different premise. Countries (like her native Philippines) were maybe poor and, for a wide range of reasons, unable to offer value-adding or well-paid jobs, but they had lots of willing hands with skills that could be valuable in richer and more successful economies.

Filipino children beg for money on a street in Manila on December 5, 2018. According to a new study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, inflation and natural disasters threaten to sink more Filipino households into poverty if the government fails to implement needed interventions. Photo: EPA-EFE

If they could provide the skills those rich countries needed, then they could not only earn and save for their own futures, but learn new skills by being exposed to new and different countries, and then return home to apply those foreign-acquired skills for the benefit of their original home communities.

Their savings could be used to drive entrepreneurship and now businesses in parts of the country that had for many years been trapped in a quagmire of poverty.

The crucial difference was that these workers had no interest in migrating to distant countries with different cultures and, sometimes, miserable climates.

They had families and communities they wanted to return to. Instead of spending their lives as unemployed burdens on their home economy, they were earning, funding their kids through school and university, and remitting savings that could be used in thousands of small new businesses.

In the Philippines today, part of Ho’s vision has come to life. An estimated 2.3 million Filipinos work overseas, remitting home around US$28 billion in 2017. Here in Hong Kong, we stereotype them mainly as domestic helpers, but in places like Dubai, Canada or France, they fill a much wider range of skills gaps.

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But the “Return” part of her “Earn, Learn, Return” vision has worked less well. The government still fails dismally (as do counterparts in Indonesia and other important sources of international workers) in creating the opportunities or environment at home that would encourage these important contributors to the economy to return to their families and home communities.

Blame corruption. Blame ill-developed financial systems that make it difficult to put remittances to good use.

Watch: The documentary giving voice to Hong Kong’s ‘helpers’

While not formally using the “Earn, Learn, Return” concept, China has for the past 150 years captured its spirit, albeit driven for much of that time by war – including civil war – and the pressure of acute poverty.

And, like the Philippines or Indonesia today, the “Return” part of the equation worked very poorly – at least until Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policies from the late 1970s, and the decision to encourage youngsters to study abroad in droves.

China’s Ministry of Education said last year that more than 600,000 Chinese left China in the 2017-18 academic year to study abroad, with 480,000 returning in the same year.

The Ministry said a total of 5.2 million Chinese have studied abroad in the past 40 years: “Exposure to an international educational environment equips these returning scholars with global insight and a competitive edge in strategically important fields.”

How the paranoia of Sino-US rivalry is affecting Chinese students

The process was viewed broadly as a clear “win-win”, in particular in the education destination of choice – the US, which attracted around 45 per cent of these international students.

Not only was this steady flow of China’s brightest and best seen as a marvellous stimulus on campuses across the US, but it was a driver of continuous innovation, and a terrific money earner for the US services economy.

The organisation NAFSA: Association of International Educators calculates that international students contributed US$39 billion to the economy in the 2017-18 academic year, and supported over 450,000 jobs. For perspective, remember that the US exported more than US$28 billion in soybeans last year.

But the US administration, fed by paranoia from parts of the intelligence and defence establishment, and championed with missionary zeal by the likes of Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton and trade director Peter Navarro, has defined this “Earn, Learn, Return” process as dangerous for the US, being exploited through schemes like China’s Thousand Talents Programme to steal US intellectual property on a massive and orchestrated scale.

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Lost on such zealots is the pressing economic need to meet skills shortages across the region, even though demographic changes mean that 17 of Apec’s 21 member economies must now cope with declining working-age populations.

It seems that whether China encourages “Earn, Learn, Return” or “Earn, Learn, Stay”, its students (and scientists) are now seen not as important contributors to US economic growth and innovation, but as a potential cancer that needs to be purged before national security is put in danger.

Through this paranoid prism, all forms of international exchange are potentially an existential threat to national security and a theft of valuable intellectual property.

Anyone who travels away from their country of birth to study or work elsewhere is in essence treasonous – either leaching their home country of much-needed talent, or potentially deep in espionage to trawl IP illicitly back home from innovative institutions abroad.

Such “citizens of nowhere” are by definition a threat. And, by the way, they are massively concentrated in dynamic specialised services economies like Hong Kong or Singapore.

As skills shortages and mismatches become more acute across the region, we need to throw such paranoia aside, and get back to developing the practical and mutually beneficial cooperation defined by Doris Ho’s “Earn, Learn, Return”.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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