How Are US-China Tensions Affecting Student Exchange?

FILE - Security guards stand at an entrance to the Wanliu Campus of Peking University on May 17, 2022, in Beijing.

There are currently only about 350 Americans studying in China, down from 15,000 a decade ago. Meanwhile, there are over 300,000 Chinese nationals studying in the U.S. The mismatch is due to growing mistrust in the U.S. of China’s government, as well as the impact of China’s "zero-COVID" strategy on foreign travel – and it has consequences for the future.

"It just seems like China is knowing much more about the rest of the world, but the U.S. is not getting to know much more about what’s going on outside of the states," said one student at New York University’s Shanghai campus. Hear from her and others in this piece from Janis Mackey Freyer and Jennifer Jett for NBC. (June 2023)