Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Niel, Evie, Raghav, and Aanika, welcome to the show. It's a real treat to have you and I'm really looking forward to talking about your experience of our U.S.-China Student Dialogue program.

Niel Swanepoel (G’26): Thank you so much for having me, Eleanor. I had a really great time and excited to talk about it.

Raghav Akula (SFS’27): Thanks so much for having us.

Aanika Veedon (SFS’26): Likewise. Excited to be here.

Eleanor M. Albert: To kick us off, I was curious, what was it that initially got you interested in participating in the Student Dialogue?

Niel Swanepoel: Maybe I'll retrace the steps and start very early on. I'm a first year MSFS student, originally from Namibia, which is in Southern Africa. And my interest in China started in my undergrad thesis where I was looking at China-Africa relations, and that was the first time I'd studied China and realized that I know so little about this civilization, this political system in this country, and I really wanted to dive deeper into that.

Since I've been at Georgetown, I've really been able to scratch that itch and learn a lot more. When the chance came to actually engage on these issues with colleagues and student friends in China, with the ultimate goal of visiting them in country, it was such a good opportunity. Since coming to the [United] States as an international student, it was interesting to also see how that plays in with the U.S. angle and U.S.-China relations. Something I had misjudged to a large extent is seeing how fraught relations are between the U.S. and China, and really trying to understand that and delve deeper into those issues.

Evie Steele (SFS’26): I have been studying the Chinese language since I was 11, studying China at Georgetown. My major is regional comparative studies, so Asian studies, and I've been focusing on China but had never actually been to China. So of course, the opportunity to engage with Chinese students and the opportunity to go to China was very attractive. But also I really do believe in dialogue as a means to foster friendship and combat misconceptions that we have about each other's countries. You hear a lot in Georgetown classes. Of course the government narrative is strategic competition and you hear so much of that: that China is the enemy, that U.S.-China will be constantly in conflict, and that there's no point even trying to engage with China.

While it's important for us to think about security considerations, I also don't think that just sticking to each other's countries and not engaging at all is productive. I think the best way to learn about the problems that we both face and the issues in U.S.-China relations is to talk to people on the other side of the divide. So that also drew me—the opportunity to speak to Chinese students studying similar things to me and hear their perspectives on the same issues and have that inform my perspective on the issues and move forward with a different perspective.

Aanika Veedon: It started for me with a general interest in the role of China in the Indo-Pacific, but in terms of the world more broadly, thinking about the U.S. and China as two great powers. I found it really interesting to see where we could work together in terms of global governance. I think that the application [for the dialogue] coming at a time of tension, amid the trade war, made me consider why engagement and conversation between our two countries is so important now, more than ever. I wanted to be a part of that and experience it firsthand.

Eleanor M. Albert: Raghav, your thoughts?

Raghav Akula: The theme of the dialogue that we were in was the future of U.S.-China relations. That meant that we needed to form foundations of mutual understanding between us and other students in China because those students will likely be the ones to go on and build some sort of power in Chinese society when we all grow up. I think that some of these informal relationships between the two opposing sides can make a huge difference in times of intense tension because over the past couple years. These Track II dialogues have been being formed to build relationships with each other and exchange ideas, and come to a common understanding of the risks.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to unpack that a little bit more, but our Student Dialogue program takes place in two parts. Right? There's initial Zoom sessions that take place virtually, and then there's a study tour component as well as some in-person student work. I want to first dig into talking a little bit about the virtual component of the dialogue and from those interactions, what were the most surprising takeaways? What were you able to unpack in some of those sessions, and how did it set you up for the next part of the program?

Niel Swanepoel: We had four virtual exchanges with our PKU student counterparts, and these were very useful to delve deeper on key issues. We were fortunate that all these took place amongst massive international upheavals. There was the U.S. election; there was COP29; there were Trump's cabinet picks. I also think it was very useful to have these sessions to break the ice and get a little bit more comfortable with people. We weren't quite sure how candid should we be? Establishing that trust took some time.

Surprising takeaways for me probably was that the Georgetown students were a lot more comfortable picking apart and framing a lot of issues, ranging from climate to trade and commerce, in national security language and concerns, and honing in on that. Whereas, I felt that our counterparts at Peking were phrasing a lot of these issues more in developmental terms and global governance. Coming from a third perspective, which is more from the Global South, I think, that seemed to be quite consistent with both what I've experienced in the U.S. where concerns about China are very much related to national security implications, whereas back home in Namibia and in South Africa, the Chinese messaging is very much on development and cooperation.

Evie Steele: There are two surprising elements, which is firstly, the ease with which we were able to foster personal connections. And then two, I thought some of the Chinese students' views on U.S.-China relations and the U.S. and Chinese roles in the world were really interesting. But to start with the personal connections, we were able to realize very quickly that we had a lot in common. All upperclassmen undergrads, or in the Chinese students group, some first-year master students. We'd all had the experience of being in a very stressful undergrad program, all had the experience of talking about U.S.-China relations and writing papers about U.S.-China relations and taking tests about U.S.-China relations, so we could bond over the student aspect in this moment in time.

We also found that we had a lot in common outside of U.S.-China issues, sports in particular. We talked a lot about just food. We talked a lot about what campus is like living in our country's capitals. What that experience is like versus our hometowns. We were able to bond very quickly.

Then in terms of U.S.-China relations, I was intrigued by hearing what the Chinese students had to say. We hear so much a very unified narrative of everything China does, it does because it wants to beat the U.S. It was really interesting to hear the Chinese students say that the narrative they hear is that a lot of Chinese policy that we interpret as “beat the U.S. foreign policy” is actually, from their perspective, to improve China's domestic situation.

So cooperation on climate agreements with other countries: the Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects are to improve the Chinese supply chain. Production of EVs [electric vehicles] is to improve the Chinese economy and improve the pollution situation in China. And what we see as very competitive and moves designed to challenge the U.S.'s dominance in global affairs are actually, from their perspective, domestic issues that don't even have anything to do with the U.S. in a sense. It was interesting to hear that perspective that I'd never heard before and that inform, I think, the way that I now view Chinese foreign policy moves.

Eleanor M. Albert: The optimism that you share for this is really heartening because, as someone who also got into this as a student and I spent time in China, it's incredible to see that you all still see the value of exchanging ideas with people who have very different contexts, different educational settings, upbringings, et cetera. That has so much value.

Raghav, what comes to mind in thinking about what you gained and what you learned from the virtual side of things?

Raghav Akula: One thing that was surprising is, I came in knowing that we had very different angles and opinions on policies. That was very obvious. It was actually a lot deeper than that in some cases. There were some fundamental presuppositions of our arguments that were different, that stemmed from different worldviews.

But the Tsinghua students always kept emphasizing cooperation and collaboration, which I did really appreciate. But in some cases, it wasn’t necessarily as viable as we were making it out to be. It was optimistic, but not necessarily realistic. Each side right now is worried a lot about its dependencies on the other, especially on the U.S. side. There's not much China can tell the U.S. to really alleviate its concerns. With AI [artificial intelligence], as long as there's military applications of this thing, there's no way cooperation will be seen as a good thing, especially again on the U.S. side.

Funny enough, one of the main areas of consensus, at least that I encountered, were just mutual confusion over the Trump administration’s policies both on the Chinese and the U.S. sides. The Tsinghua students might have been confused about the tariffs, and honestly we couldn’t do that much to alleviate that confusion. But the broad takeaway there was that we as people, as nations, clearly do not have enough of these discussions because we can quarrel diplomatically and economically, but it’s entirely a different thing to disagree on the fundamental frameworks that we use to approach issues. In great power dynamics where there is a lot going on with high stakes, we really don’t have an excuse for not trying to understand each other as best we can.

Eleanor M. Albert: I was curious if you could give an example of this fundamental difference, or these contextual foundations that were so opposed?

Raghav Akula: One really big example is the way that the U.S. government and people surrounding the U.S. government contextualize everything in a security mindset, for better or worse. We think about everything in terms of security. If you want your issue to be paid attention to in the U.S., you better frame it as something related to security. If you care about climate change, it's climate security. If you care about human rights, it's human security. When we were talking to the Tsinghua students, there was a disconnect between what the students were thinking and maybe what the government was thinking on a broader, more strategic level.

Eleanor M. Albert: One last follow-up. I want to press you on asking about whether your Georgetown counterparts compared to your Chinese counterparts, did you find that students from both countries fully related and accepted the premises that their governments laid out for them in terms of how these concepts were structured? If we're talking about disagreements, is there a wholesale acceptance of the frameworks that the governments are using that the students are also then taking to these conversations?

Raghav Akula: On the U.S. side, we were a lot more likely to disagree with the frameworks put out by our government. Whereas on the Beijing side, I think they were much more likely to adopt some of the rhetoric of the Chinese government, but also to be a little more distanced from it. For example, if we asked about something that the Chinese military was doing, some response that we might hear was, “The PLA does what it does and we're not supposed to be bothered with it.”

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to turn to Aanika. Anything surprising that came from the virtual dialogue sessions?

Aanika Veedon: I'll first just add on to Raghav’s point. Specifically about the difference in frameworks and perspectives. It's why it was so important that we had the in-person component to the tour as well, particularly when we talked about difference in shared histories. A lot of that came out when we spoke to people such as professors at Tsinghua, or different government organizations, or with the media. That in-person aspect was really crucial to building understanding. We have completely grown up in two different political systems with different understandings of history and the role of our government.

Over Zoom, we were running into this roadblock in some of our conversations, of feeling that we weren't really able to connect on a deeper level. In one meeting, we started our talk by just talking about how our weeks are going, how we're really busy with school and finals coming up. Even just those few minutes of dialogue and shared experience as college students completely changed the rest of the discussion. I think that that was very surprising to me and also demonstrated the importance of the student-to-student dialogue because we had this experience that we could really bond over, however small it was. That created a foundation of trust that I think carried throughout the rest of the dialogues, but also really being in-person. That's probably what surprised me the most.

Eleanor M. Albert: We're going to move a little bit towards the study tour portion. Was this your first time to China? And then within that context, what are your initial impressions? Did you have one or two big highlights from the tour that you want to mention?

Evie Steele: Having learned about China for so long, you get a sense of different places, but not sort of the unity of the whole place, in a sense. You learn about Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and other Beijing sites, but then you don't really learn about the culture and the business side to see how the whole city fits in.

In Beijing for example, there's the ancient buildings next to the brand-new high rises and the little street food, Chinese restaurants in the hutongs next to Western-style shopping malls. I think that was a big surprise to me, seeing the way that these historic sites that I knew about in these neighborhoods that I'd heard about, fit in within the broader urban landscape.

And the same in Shanghai. It was the newness and the cosmopolitan nature of the city, the financial district, all of these things I'd read and heard about and then how that fit in within this broader landscape of food and culture and people. That was what really excited me about the trip. Of course, the food was incredible. I would say I was surprised most of all. I had had high expectations, but it surpassed my expectations.

Both cities had a sense of there's something new around every corner, and if you go down the street you might find the best yangrou chuan, the best lamb skewer, that you've ever had. Or you might find, in Beijing, a historic site from the imperial times. Or in Shanghai, a really unique Chinese store. The
sense that each city was living was very, very real, and I really enjoyed being in a place that felt just so busy in a sense. So much to discover.

Niel Swanepoel: This was my first time in China. I've tried almost everything I could to visit China, but with COVID[-19] and everything, it's been very difficult. This was such a unique opportunity that I was really, really grateful for. It's very different having read about a place and write about a place and then to actually go there in person and to see that there’s things you just can't capture without living there, or at least experiencing the brief time that we were.

Some of the key highlights, probably, to me was the roundtable we had with a research unit within the NDRC, the National Development and Reform Commission, which is a pretty high-level executive department of the State Council, and they're responsible for a lot of macroeconomic planning. It was fascinating, firstly, to have that access to that kind of level of Chinese government officials and that they were willing to meet with us, and to understand the process and the dynamics with such a visit. The process was very formalized. Everyone had prepared remarks on the NDRC side. We were given an agenda with which focus areas of questions we were allowed to ask.

We got a rich detail and understanding of what the Chinese government is focused on strategically in their economic reform, which is very much focused on private sector, leading a lot of the economic reforms, and definitely talk about liberalization of the economy.

If I can plug in another one, what was also great was our experience meeting with the Georgetown alumni in China. Wonderful to see the campus connections and what people are doing and what are people's experience on the ground, working in China, and how things have changed, especially over the last five years.

Aanika Veedon: I'll give you two big highlights. The first would be meeting the university students at both Hong Kong University and Tsinghua University. The second was getting to meet with think tanks, government organizations, and broader alumni in both places.

What I found so valuable was meeting students from both universities and getting a better understanding of how everyone's perspectives have been shaped by the way that they grew up. Whether that was under different political systems, with different ethnic backgrounds, even educational backgrounds. That type of valuable experience of speaking firsthand and being able to bond over small things.

Second, I'll talk a little bit about the meetings that we had. We met with the American Chamber of Commerce, with Goldman Sachs, and with the National Development and Reform Commission of China. These visits gave us the context and the understanding that we needed, which is a very different story than what you hear and read in the media. It was meeting different people in all parts of society, meeting people on the ground, that's the necessary context that you need to understand a culture and society and be able to work with them.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fantastic. Did you have a favorite visit or conversation that stood out in particular?

Aanika Veedon: For me, it would be our South China Morning Post conversation. It’s something that I think a lot of us read. Their largest audience is Americans. Being there, speaking to editors, and hearing about their experience covering issues in Hong Kong that often can be misconstrued by the Western media was really fascinating. I will also just say the openness across the board, being receptive to questions was really fantastic. Especially when we met with the National Development and Reform Commission of China. They were so open and it was a very collaborative environment.

Evie Steele: I think the opportunity to meet our Peking University counterparts was really enjoyable. We made friendships. The opportunity to talk, not just about U.S.-China dialogue, but to see their campus and see where they like to eat and get a glimpse into the life of a Chinese student in China, that was something that was really enjoyable.

My group, even after the study tour, has been staying in touch, which is really awesome. I'm glad to have that connection to them and I hope that can keep going because I think those connections are really important for just fostering U.S.-China friendship in the future.

Then, of course, it was a highlight to see all the historic sites that I'd read about in textbooks. I remember learning in high school Chinese class about how to say the Forbidden City in Chinese and then to actually go there, it felt very fulfilling to practice Chinese language as well.

Raghav Akula: For the sake of being unique, I'll have my first highlight be working on a group project. The group project was where we had two Georgetown students, including myself, and then four Tsinghua students. Our thematic focus was business and trade and U.S.-China competition and collaboration. When we finally met the Tsinghua students when we got to Beijing, we realized that out of the six of us, none of us had a background in business or trade. Honestly, that was one of the sections that I also knew the least about.

When we got there, neither I nor the other Georgetown student had our laptops with us. This was also the period in time where we had 145% tariffs on China, and China had 125% tariffs on us. We just sat there for an hour, trying to logic out our trade policy. But the conclusion that we reached at the end of this presentation was that 100%-plus tariffs on each other was a bit, let's say, inane. But to satisfy each other's security concerns, it made sense for our economies to be a little less reliant on each other. But less economic coupling also means less deterrents against military conflict, which was a pretty chilling prospect to converge upon.

The second big highlight was differences between what we could hear in Beijing and what we could hear in Hong Kong. Obviously, in Beijing, there are not a lot of instances where they will actively criticize the government. That was not necessarily true on the Georgetown side. Whereas in Hong Kong, I think there were many instances where they could talk from a more objective standpoint about the Chinese government and the U.S. government, which I thought was really interesting. You could have a discussion about Taiwan in Hong Kong that you probably couldn’t easily have in Beijing.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's great. I want to pivot back a little bit. In terms of what your preconceived notions were before going to China. Now, you've had an experience to go there, you've interacted with your counterparts both virtually, but now in person in their environment. What are some of the things that changed your perception?

Niel Swanepoel: We had such wonderful conversations within our cohort late at night, during karaoke, or during family-style Peking duck, about what were some of the perceptions that we had coming in? Did our perspective change?

I think we should also be frank in saying that this is a tough spot for U.S.-China relations, and we're not going to change the trajectory massively through one student dialogue. A lot of us were pragmatic in that the core beliefs and the structures that we maybe knew about were not going to change anytime soon. I think [the] U.S. and China will remain strategic competitors. But I think what we shared was that at the end of the day, what was so useful about these exchanges is that you realize that, especially when engaging with the Peking students, we're all young people trying to figure out things in a big world. We're all worried about: are we going to get a job? Or, what's going to be the impact of AI on our future? We're worried about our families. These just humanize a lot of things that are cloaked in a lot of scarier language and implications when you don't see people face-to-face.

It allows me at least to think about these issues in a lot more empathetic terms. I think that's sometimes missing when we think about these big, international challenges, because they're so huge in scope you often forget that it's people at the end of the day. I found that even engaging with people in the private sector in China when we visited an EV company or even at the NDRC, people are just doing their jobs and they also have interests and families. That was just a useful pulse check to remember that.

Eleanor M. Albert: To conclude, I'm going to put two questions together, and one of them is for you to look back at the work that you did in your small groups. Is there a takeaway that you came away from? Were there things that you and your BeiDa counterparts really aligned on? Were there any elements where there was any type of divergence? And then to sum everything up, why are student dialogues and exchanges like these so important, and what role do they play for you?

Evie Steele: To answer your first question, we found a lot of agreement on the issue of people-to-people dialogue, which makes sense since we were doing people-to-people dialogue. I think we were all in agreement that having, whether they’re casual conversations or conversations on major issues, that that dialogue is needed for us to truly understand each other. We also, I think, agreed that the problems that our countries need to face are extremely important and it's best to do so together. The problem of climate, problems of global development, pandemics, I think we agree that there were so many issues where we needed to work together and that people-to-people dialogue and having that interpersonal understanding is a huge way of combating the common misconceptions.

The overall takeaway was it's so important to keep having dialogues and student dialogue in general. Getting the opportunity to go from the classroom to the place you're reading about in class is just an incredible opportunity, not just in terms of where we go, what future careers we end up going into and U.S.-China issues or not, but also as students, the opportunity to expose yourself to different perspectives and to see perspectives that go against what you might've said in class, what you might have read in class.

Niel Swanepoel: I think maybe I'll hazard to say that in general, across all the subgroups, there were a lot more points of agreement rather than disagreement. I thought that that was quite telling and that we shouldn't forget that even in an era where strategic competition is intense, there are, and there remain, a lot of areas of cooperation.

But honing in specifically on our commerce and trade subgroup, what we really tried to figure out is how can we orientate the business environment towards one of increased interaction rather than decreased interaction, and promote that in ways that expand competition but in a more productive way? We were truly trying to think what kind of market incentives can we align that can better engender more economic cooperation between the U.S. and China? I think climate cooperation was definitely one of them. And then, we thought that finance and development assistance could be a second one.

We're in an unfortunate reality which makes this type of experience so, so precious, but also very rare. One of the stats that has kept on ringing in my mind, and this was from the first student virtual dialogue, was that there are currently 1,000 Chinese students at Georgetown alone, international students. There are currently less than 1,000 American students in China. This to me was quite shocking.

You're dealing with a country and you're dealing with a culture and a people who you're not interacting with, you're not engaging with. I think that kind of humanity is lost. That is what, to me, was so important from this dialogue—meeting with these students. What are their interests? Where can you work together? That people-to-people aspect was really important.

Raghav Akula: Right now, the U.S. and China obviously are locked in so many types of strategic competition, but we also fall down that rabbit hole of us versus them. I think it's imperative for things like the U.S.-China Student Dialogues to exist to make sure that once the fog clears, there's at least some appetite for cooperation, and already established relationships and friendships that can facilitate that cooperation.

Since beginning the virtual dialogues with Tsinghua students, I've been forced to reckon with some laughable ignorance about the other side. Every opportunity on that trip was essentially a learning opportunity. There were times where the Chinese students were telling me about AI use cases for American models that I didn't even know about. I went into China knowing one word in Mandarin and I came out knowing two, which is 100% improvement.

The project, and the experience, and the dialogues between people, it helped reveal something pretty deep. That was the fundamental tension between a competition and cooperation that extends to some of humanity's greatest challenges that China and the U.S. have to deal with. These existential risks of climate change, and artificial intelligence, and weapons of mass destruction. The blame for failing to address these threats and take advantage of opportunities, and to disseminate beneficial technologies to the rest of the world, would fall on the U.S. and China. Engaging with students from China has emboldened me not to let either of our countries live with the legacy of failing.

Eleanor M. Albert: Aanika, your thoughts?

Aanika Veedon: I think that both sides came away with a lot of learning to do. I was really reflecting on one of the things that the professor at Tsinghua said, which was "maybe in the future we'll do these dialogues in both Chinese and English, and not just in English." Raghav spoke to this too, but we were two out of three I believe of the only students on the whole trip that had no knowledge of Mandarin. I know that I left with really wanting to learn and that's one of my plans in senior year is to take an intro-level Chinese class. I think that's an amazing takeaway right there.

To the point of why these dialogues are so important, is that there is a level of openness and trust that you get between students that I think is incredibly hard to do in higher-level dialogues, especially between government and state officials. I think Georgetown's at the forefront of this. I don't think that there are many other universities that have this type of engagement. That really speaks to the level of openness that we as students have, but also that Georgetown, as an institution, has to engage in these types of dialogues.

There was a mutual understanding that America and China are the two great powers that are really in the world right now. And that in order to work on issues such as climate change, or AI and technology, it has to come from cooperation. The only way that you have cooperation is by opening dialogue.

That was one of my takeaways. One student actually asked us this question, which was, "Hey, are you feeling pessimistic about U.S.-China relations?" We sat with that and one of our responses was, "Well, no, because we're here." I think that this dialogue, amid the trade war, the fact that people have been so willing to open up, to show us their campus, to take us around Beijing, really I think demonstrates that everything in the media is not all that. It really comes down to genuine human connection, which I think often can be lost in this day and age. It was a really, really powerful experience. I know it gave all of us a very large amount of optimism looking toward the future.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fantastic. Thank you for being such wonderful ambassadors for this program. I hope that these takeaways last with you as you go on into your careers.

For more our Student Dialogue, see our feature stories on our Fall 2024 cohort and Spring 2025 cohort.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.