美中全球议题对话项目

Having grown up visiting China many times, I regarded this spring break trip not only as an opportunity to dialogue with Chinese peers, but also to reconnect with a country I had not seen in six years. Upon returning to Shanghai, I found much that was familiar to me: plane trees still line city streets and the drive from Pudong International Airport to Jing’an District passed by many of the familiar sites I remember from my childhood. And yet, after taking classes on Chinese history and politics and learning more about U.S.-China relations, I could also approach my visit through a different pair of eyes than I had at fifteen.

One of the key themes I noticed throughout our many site visits was the sincere gratitude our hosts expressed to us for visiting China. Beyond being a polite way to open up a meeting, these expressions of gratitude reflected their awareness of a trend that has arisen in recent years: Americans aren’t coming to China. In DC, China is frequently talked about in classrooms, think tanks, and government offices, and yet Americans are doing less talking with Chinese students, researchers, and government officials themselves. Over the past four years of college I have focused on studying China, and yet my class discussions too were primarily limited to American viewpoints. This gap in interacting with Chinese perspectives made my week in China all the more enriching.

Through conversations with students at Peking University, we discussed areas in which there was still space for our countries to collaborate and build trust. Outside of the official dialogues, we also discussed hopes for our lives after college, and I found that some of their dreams of pursuing education abroad and pursuing careers in research and academia echoed my own. Although we may have been raised in separate countries on two sides of the Pacific, our discussions revealed how our future plans will be collectively shaped by the trajectory of U.S.-China relations.

During our visits to think tanks and business organizations, I also saw how although there were many places in which the opinions of our governments diverged, there were also topics on which the perspectives of American and Chinese citizens aligned. On one visit to a think tank, I was surprised to hear a researcher’s comment that China needs U.S. climate cooperation; I’ve been so used to discussions in the United States of how the American withdrawal from climate commitments is a win for China, it was practically a fact to me. And yet, I hadn’t considered that on an individual level, we will all experience the impacts of a warming planet. Geopolitical rivalries are not climate scientists’ primary existential concern.

A week is hardly enough time to explore a single city, let alone get even close to discussing all the complexities in a relationship as multifaceted as the one between the United States and China. Regardless, I am grateful for the opportunity to once again return to China after four years of studying it in the classroom.

Eileen Miller (SFS'26) is a student at Georgetown University studying regional studies with a concentration in East Asia and minoring in Chinese.