[OPINION] China education and its tradeoffs — from someone who actually studied there

• Understanding China requires proximity and context, emphasizing the importance of language and direct engagement with its society and institutions.
• While there are risks associated with educational partnerships with China, such as potential coercion, these relationships can also provide valuable insights and foster dialogue amidst political tensions.
• Maintaining academic exchanges with China is crucial for enhancing the Philippines' understanding of its neighbor, as these interactions can humanize relations and contribute to a more nuanced perspective beyond geopolitical disputes.

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How do we best study a country as complex and as consequential as China? As social scientists, we are taught that proximity matters, and that context is essential to developing a nuanced understanding of any subject. Context, after all, is difficult to grasp from afar. Language reveals nuance, while daily interactions expose assumptions and practices that are easily misread through the lens of our own backgrounds. 

This is a basic instinct of Area Studies. I went to China for my language training, my Master’s, and eventually my PhD — seven years of serious scholarship to understand this country we often take for granted. Therefore, language proficiency and getting closer to the people and institutions behind policymaking was, for me, a methodological priority. It is an academic decision that allowed me to participate in Chinese society while observing how ordinary citizens themselves make sense of China’s rise. 

Recently, Alvin Camba, a defense-tech scientist based in the US, brought renewed attention to an important discussion about scholarship and the vulnerability of Philippine universities to China’s growing influence. This has become especially salient of late, following questionable claims from some Chinese universities touching on issues of Philippine sovereignty beyond the West Philippine Sea. Indeed, what Alvin has written raises a conversation worth having. And as someone who has actually studied in China, I recognize that there are real risks — many of which Alvin has carefully outlined — but also important benefits to receiving a China education and, more broadly, to sustaining academic partnerships with our Chinese counterparts.

Ensuring scrutiny without retreat 

Philippine universities are definitely underfunded, creating strong incentives for Filipino scholars to seek opportunities elsewhere. When it comes to obtaining college and postgraduate education outside the Philippines, I would wager that, even as the number of Filipinos studying in China has grown, most still gravitate toward more traditional destinations (for example: United States, Australia, and Canada). 

That said, I agree that foreign partnerships in general, not only those involving countries with direct strategic interests in the Philippines, deserve transparency and appropriate institutional safeguards. At UP for instance, regular faculty members like me who apply for the privilege of study leave are required to disclose the scholarships we receive, our study plans and research proposals, as well as our intended engagements throughout the duration of our studies — regardless of host university or destination. These are renewed annually and disclosed all the way to the administrative higher ups — safeguards that long predate the current debate over China-linked education. Indeed, this reflects UP’s commitment in ensuring that while academic opportunities should be encouraged, these are not pursued without accountability. 

As for leverage arising from asymmetric dependence on Chinese funding, it is useful to distinguish potential from actual coercive use. While such coercion is theoretically possible, Chinese scholarships are better understood as long-term instruments of soft power statecraft. Like all countries providing scholarships, China naturally expects some return on that investment, mostly through greater receptiveness to its perspectives. If the concern is that China-funded scholars may simply become active parrots of the party-state, then the proper response is not to discriminate them by the source of their funding alone. Greater transparency must be matched by serious scrutiny of the scholarship they actually produce. 

As for the hosting of foreign scholars on our campuses and the new partnerships being forged with counterparts, I agree that there remains room for greater scrutiny. There is scope for deeper inter-agency collaboration between Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) and relevant government institutions in developing more mature safeguards for these engagements. The point is that the vulnerabilities associated with Chinese educational partnerships are real, especially given China’s growing assertiveness. But recognizing those risks should not mean sacrificing academic exchanges that could otherwise be productive. I outline some benefits below. 

Where exchange can endure despite political tensions

Having studied and lived in China since 2015, I have seen both the highs and lows of educational exchange with Beijing. In recent years, as countries increasingly wary of China have scaled back academic exchanges over legitimate security concerns, my peers and I have lamented the trend. The danger is that, in trying to reduce vulnerability, governments may also weaken one of the few relatively neutral spaces where dialogue can continue even as political relations deteriorate. Educational exchange, while no substitute for diplomacy, can provide a useful channel through which students, scholars, and institutions remain engaged amid worsening relations. 

It was the 1958 Lacy-Zarubin Agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that created a formal framework for scientific, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges even as the two countries remained strategic adversaries during the Cold War. These exchanges did not erase rivalry or distrust, but they certainly kept channels of contact open, widened opportunities for scholars to understand the other side more closely through areas where mutually beneficial cooperation is preserved.  

As mutual distrust between the Philippines and China deepens, there is all the more reason to preserve, rather than retreat from academic engagement. Indeed, HEIs such as UP can provide one of the few relatively neutral spaces where dialogue and intellectual contact can continue even when official political relations become strained. And as such, the relatively safe space universities provide can serve as an important starting point from which strained relations may eventually recover and move in a more constructive direction 

Where we can better understand the adversary

Before China began opening its doors more aggressively to educational exchange, much of the Philippines’ knowledge of China relied heavily on English-language sources, second-hand analysis, and historical interpretations produced in more developed Western countries. These inevitably shaped how China was understood in the Philippines. Indeed, Pinoy China scholars have long lamented this dependence on externally produced knowledge. If anything, that condition comes closer to a more appropriate appreciation of epistemic narrowing — understanding our most consequential neighbor largely through intellectual frameworks and sources developed elsewhere, rather than also building the capacity to study China directly in its own language and on its own terms.

It is ironic and counterproductive to respond to this danger of epistemic narrowing by even narrowing the routes through which Filipinos can come to know China. Likewise, reducing the value of a China education to zero-sum terms, where scholars trained there are presumed to have an inadequate grasp of global affairs beyond Party doctrine, is not only unfair but also inaccurate to the academic environment in China. There are certainly boundaries and norms that social scientists working in China must navigate and, at times, cannot cross. But those constraints do not automatically mean that the scholarship produced there simply reproduces official narratives. My own work on China’s use of unilateral sanctions as a form of emotional coercion is a case in point — labels I doubt would particularly please the Party leadership.

Where we can go beyond contentious issues 

Having spent much of my formative academic years in China, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to balance love of country while still allowing oneself to be human behind “enemy lines.” But issues can be compartmentalized, and relationships are more complex than geopolitics alone. And perhaps that can be an opportunity for us to have a much wider view of Philippine-China relations, something that I definitely realized only when I was allowed to study in China. 

The West Philippine Sea matters enormously, and we should continue standing up for our rights there. Yet it rarely came up naturally in my everyday conversations with my Chinese colleagues — partly because it is not my primary research area, partly because it just doesn’t preoccupy everyday human conversations, and partly because, to them, Tianhao (my Chinese name) is more than the West Philippine Sea. I am their Filipino classmate who is surprisingly good at badminton, the slightly older PhD student they sometimes turn to for advice, and that foreign student who is always fashionably late in meetings. 

As a China observer, that ordinary human familiarity mattered because it reminded me that while political disputes dominate headlines, they do not necessarily define our everyday interactions. In my quieter moments, I definitely think deeply about the differences between our two countries and what they mean for foreign policy. But I never allowed those differences to erase the sense of pakikipagkapwa I genuinely experienced during my academic years in Beijing. That, to me, is one of the quieter values of educational exchanges. They allow a measure of humanity to endure even when official relations are strained.

Let us work together 

Rather than indirectly casting doubt on the scholarship and credibility of those who have chosen to seriously study China from within, we should recognize that, ultimately, we are on the same team. We are all just trying to improve the Philippines’ understanding of the world, widen its choices, and sharpen its strategies. I agree that the risks of unwanted leverage from an increasingly powerful and assertive neighbor are real, and stronger safeguards are definitely necessary. But the answer to China’s growing power cannot be to study China less, nor engage it less. If anything, the more consequential China becomes to the Philippines, the more important it is that more Filipinos know it up close—as close to the “source” as possible. – Rappler.com

Enrico V. Gloria, PhD, is an assistant professor of international relations at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. His research and writings focus on Chinese foreign policy and Philippine-China relations.