“China is the wave of the future,” said senior East Asian studies minor Paul Miller, who spent last spring studying abroad in China. “When China takes over America in 20 years, I won’t be working in the salt mines.”According to a new survey from Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation, the United States will lose its position as the world’s undisputed leading power over the next 15 years, with China emerging as a formidable rival.
Simultaneously, many students are beginning to branch outside of the traditional study-abroad locations, venturing east. China is currently the fifth most popular destination to study-abroad, right behind Britain, Italy, Spain and France.
According to the report “Open Doors 2008,” in the 2006-07 academic year, the number of U.S. college students studying abroad increased by eight percent over the previous year. Students studying in China increased by 25 percent.
“China is a great place to wander and explore,” said Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Eric Mortensen. “It is a very welcoming country and is one of the safest places in the world for women to travel alone. Tens of thousands of people wander around China every year knowing no Chinese.”
For those interested in studying abroad in China, Guilford offers several affiliate programs. The first is through CET, where students travel to Beijing and Shanghai. The other program is through the School for International Training (SIT) where students study in rural southwest China, spending their semester studying the country’s many diverse minority groups.
“The people were super nice, the food was delicious and where I stayed in the Yunnan Province was beautiful, located right in the foothills of the Himalayas,” said Miller, who studied abroad through the SIT program.
In order to prepare for a semester in China, Mortensen recommends that students take East Asian studies courses as an introduction to the culture and take advantage of Guilford’s growing Chinese language program. However, knowing the language is not required to study abroad in China.
“There were 21 of us in my program of all different levels of Chinese. I was one of the only ones who didn’t speak any Chinese,” said Miller. “But after three weeks of intensive classes I could order food, and by the end of the program I could speak well enough to travel on my own.”
In the 2006-7 academic year, the latest for which figures are available, 11,064 Americans studied in China, a large jump from 1995-96, when only 1,396 Americans studied there, according to The New York Times.
“China is a very intelligible place for Americans,” said Mortensen. “It is an extremely modern country. The cities in China are far more technologically sophisticated than American cities and the countryside is overwhelmingly welcoming and friendly. Deep friendships happen fast in China.”
As China’s culture and society become more alluring, cultural experts suspect that the large number of students studying abroad is another sign of the nation’s growing influence as an economically and politically rising superpower in the world.
“China has a savings rate ten times ours,” said senior East Asian studies minor Xan Lovatt, who studied in Beijing in ’05 and ’06 summers. “It is one of the only countries with a serious savings and manufacturing sector. People see China as where the money is.”
With the world’s increased interest in China, students studying abroad should be wary not to idealize the country.
“It is important not to over-romanticize China or to orientalize it. It’s a very real place,” said Mortensen. “China is becoming more expensive. There are healthcare issues, a pretty damn frustrating government and plenty of greed to go around. (Regardless of its problems) I still wish Guilford was in China.