Opinion | The U.S. faces a critical shortage in China experts - The Washington Post

At a time of heightened competition with Beijing, our education system is not generating enough American citizens with Chinese language ability, meaningful lived experiences in China and deep area knowledge. And despite the ever-present refrain in Congress about the China threat, the U.S. government is actively disinvesting in China studies. The result is a serious and overlooked knowledge asymmetry that gives China — where fluency in English and U.S. culture is common — the upper hand in understanding its strategic rival. I took a very well-trodden path to becoming a China scholar. I began studying Chinese in college and went to China every summer to study the language and teach English. After graduating I was accepted into a PhD program in political science and for my dissertation I conducted several months of fieldwork in Beijing and Hunan province over three years, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. During one trip, I did a lengthy homestay with a Chinese famil

At a time of heightened competition with Beijing, our education system is not generating enough American citizens with Chinese language ability, meaningful lived experiences in China and deep area knowledge. And despite the ever-present refrain in Congress about the China threat, the U.S. government is actively disinvesting in China studies. The result is a serious and overlooked knowledge asymmetry that gives China — where fluency in English and U.S. culture is common — the upper hand in understanding its strategic rival. I took a very well-trodden path to becoming a China scholar. I began st