Should Chinese Students Stay?

The land of the free is not really free for everyone

A ngela Li, whose name has been changed for her personal safety, is twenty-seven years old, but she can hear the social clock ticking from the other side of the world. Li often hears her mother’s voice in the back of her mind: “I paid for you ’til you are grown, you run to foreign countries, you are still not married, not holding a baby, not working a stable job. Where should I put my face because of you?” Her mother continues in her thoughts, “‘What do I say when I talk to my friends? How about other people’s children who have already found a job, married an American PhD, make a lot of money, and move to New York, then take their moms on a trip? What are you doing? What do you do every day? You make me fail to lift my head in front of them!’”

Li graduated with her master’s degree in architecture in 2023, and now she is struggling with all kinds of visa and job issues. At the moment, she has an unpaid internship at an architecture firm, but her Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa is running out. If she wants to remain in the US, she needs to find a paying job that will accept an OPT, or, as Li has sometimes considered, an American husband. “Living in the United States with an unstable identity along with infinite paperwork is just exhausting,” Li said. Even so, returning to China is her least favorite option. Li does not want to return to the “toxic family relationships” she has there.

Annine Zhang, a graduate student at a film school on the West Coast, wanted to stay in the United States after graduating to pursue a career in film. However, an argument Zhang had with one of her professors has given her pause. The professor made her change the setting of one of her projects from Tibet to San Francisco to make it more “accessible” for American audiences and potential investors. Relocating settings is common in the film industry, but there was, on top of that, another incident: Zhang wanted to add a Chinese title to her pitch. She thought it communicated her idea better, but her professor asked her to delete the Chinese characters. “My professor was like, ‘I have no idea what this is, I thought those were patterns, you should delete them’.” Zhang didn’t think the professor would have said that if she was proposing to add a French or Italian title. It was the fact that the writing was Asian, she thought, that made her reject it. And in California, of all places.

But Zhang doesn’t want to go back to China, either, for some of the same reasons as Li. “I’ll be urged to get married, and I’ll have to face all sorts of family pressures when I go back,” she told me. “I’m still more focused on my career, but my family will be more interested in me starting a family.”

Zhang, somewhat uniquely for people our age, has a younger sister, and she doesn’t want her to stay in China, either. Zhang said that she was location-scouting at a high school recently when she saw a group of American high school theater students. She was struck by the fact that barely anyone was wearing glasses. In China, Zhang said, many kids have glasses, because of all the time they have to spend staring at paper and screens during their studies. Seeing those American students made Zhang want to take her twelve-year-old sister away from China, too.

Siqi Sun escaped China’s cutthroat education system and moved to Canada for high school. After two years in Canada, Sun spent another three years in the United Kingdom, studying for her bachelor’s degree in media and communications. In 2023, she was admitted to New York University for her master’s degree. She had always wanted to live in New York. However, after only living there a few months, she desperately wanted to leave.

Her schoolwork is not the problem, but for her, life in the city is too overwhelming. In addition to the rats, trash, and strange smells, the entire atmosphere, she said, is not friendly to women. “I was walking on the street wearing a little spaghetti-strap dress,” she said. She had worn a similar outfit in the UK without incident. “But that day when I wore that dress, a man was sitting on the roadside, staring at me with a gaze that made me uncomfortable. I tried to retaliate with my gaze, but he didn’t look away. I felt offended by his stare. This kind of thing has happened several times already, and I’ve never been stared at like this, not even in China. Not only did it make me feel very offended, but also scared.”

There is another reason behind Siqi’s decision to leave the United States as soon as possible: Donald Trump. “A person who sexually assaults others, sitting in a position of great power, I think this is very problematic,” she said. “For me, as a woman, this brings me great unease in this country.” So where will she go? She doesn’t have an answer for that question yet.

Many people I spoke with also said they didn’t want to return to China because of the way employees are treated. Some companies require staff to come to work six days a week from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. There is even a short phrase for this kind of working mode: “996.” Jinny Zhu interned as a software engineer in China for a few months; it was not as strict as “996,” but still, she said, “the feeling of going to work is like military training.”

There are many reasons not to go back to China: family pressure, the work environment, the surveillance state. At the same time, things in America are not quite as advertised. Some Americans are not welcoming to Chinese students and graduates. Businesses tend to treat their international hires more cavalierly. There is endless paperwork, and you are always in danger of violating the visa regime — by leaving your job that you no longer like, for example, or by traveling abroad. “I came to this country in pursuit of freedom, but now I can’t do anything,” said Shawn Li, a recent architecture graduate who couldn’t travel because of his visa restrictions. “So why should I stay here?”

I n 1979, Communist China began to liberalize its economy. The reform, known as Gǎi Gé Kāi Fàng, which means “revolution and liberalization,” pushed the command economy to become relatively freer. The central government allowed farmers to have partial control of their crops, so they could sell a portion of their crops on the free market. Other private enterprises were given wider latitude to operate and participate in the free market. The government even encouraged people to start private businesses; in fact, the government was so supportive that it indicated four cities along the coastline as “economic zones” aimed at attracting foreign investment and enhancing the import-export relationship between China and the rest of the world. Many people, especially those from the cities along the coastline of southeast China, devoted themselves to this new wave of running businesses.

Ever since then, China has become the world’s fastest-growing economy. The real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth in China was about ten percent on average, through 2014, an astonishing economic explosion. The drastically increasing GDP allowed people to accumulate profits and savings. But the economy was not the only thing that thrived at that time. For the first time since 1949, thanks to the economic reform, people could access tremendous foreign cultural catalogs: films, music, books, opinions, and studies, many of which collided with what was commonly known to be true in this once isolated land.

In 1980, a year after the economic reform, another political action had a substantial impact on China: the “one-child policy.” In it, the central government, at this time led by Deng Xiaoping, advocated for late marriage, late birth, and eugenics all to supposedly deal with the social and economic consequences of continued rapid population growth. It is estimated that the one-child policy stopped between two hundred fifty to four hundred million kids from being born. This number does not count the mothers who died when they were forced to miscarry their babies with unhygienic and painful procedures. In her documentary, One Child Nation, released in 2019, Nanfu Wang said that more people have died because of the one-child policy than the Nanjing Massacre, a fiasco in China known as one of the nation’s darkest moments, which resulted in the death of up to three hundred thousand people.

This policy, though disastrous for many, did make some other lives better. The family size of each household shrank. The average family changed from two parents with three kids to two parents with just one, meaning that one child could very likely enjoy all the economic and social resources from both of their parents. As a result, “studying abroad,” which used to be a luxury, became available to ordinary, middle-income families. Chinese students traveled to study all over the world, though the most popular destination was the United States. In 2019, there were 370,000 Chinese students studying at American universities.

The onset of COVID-19 caused the number of Chinese international students in the United States to drop dramatically, to under three hundred thousand in 2023. There are many reasons for this: Chinese students felt unsafe living in a part of the world that accused them of spreading a “Chinese Virus.” Chinese people, who had already bore the burden of constant blatant discrimination, were now in serious physical danger. Hate crimes were on the rise: in one case, an elderly man was kicked and spat on by a man who told him that he didn’t belong. Why would anyone want to stay in a country that treated people like that?

T he summer before I came to New York, I binge watched all six seasons of Gossip Girl, again, to prepare my mind for the bustling city where I always aspired to live. However, after living here for merely two months, I realized that my life more so resembled that of the titular character in Greta Gerwig’s moody black-and-white film, Frances Ha, in which a twenty-something-year-old woman is forced by unforeseen (and foreseen) circumstances to move from place to place in the city, all while learning, trying, and often failing to become a responsible adult. I too would be poor and feel guilty for spending my parents’ money; anxious about losing job opportunities due to visa issues; and lonely knowing that my friends are either busy working in New Jersey or sleeping in another time zone.

I always thought that returning to China would not be an option for me. Right now, I’m getting close to the end of my postgraduate study. I desperately need to find a job in New York City within three months of graduation just so I can continue living in a tiny, overpriced room. And then I imagine life after returning to my home country: no need to pay any rent or bills, take the taxi wherever you go. Considering these two options, it would seem as if the decision would not be difficult.

But it is very difficult. This is a very common conversation among my friends where we cannot figure out the direction for our future: What does your ideal life look like? The answers usually start with “living in an apartment” — sometimes a house — in a European city — usually Paris, though sometimes Amsterdam.

It was ironic that despite growing up in Confucian culture — which primarily values austerity and family connection — that we imagine an ideal life, we need plentiful financial assets. We want assets not because we want to be seen as being rich, but because owning assets is how we feel safe and secure. Without money, how would we survive, let alone take care of our aging parents?

However, after considering this option for twenty minutes or so, we always come back to the realization that we are living the lives we once imagined in China — except that it does not start with an apartment in Paris. One of my friends once said, “If I am willing to take a tiny step back, all of the ideal lives that I ever dreamed about can be reality.”

I happened to feel similarly — and we both had trouble compromising on our goals. I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly that “tiny step” was. Was it pretending not to see the chained mother of eight in Xuzhou? Or acting like you couldn’t hear the cries and screams for help in a locked building on fire in Xinjiang? (In that case, it was a normal and slow day, just like every other day during the lockdown, with people staying in their apartments without the option to leave: the local bureau locked the building with iron bars. Ten people were killed in the fire. No one knows if they were anticipating that sort of crisis, but it happened anyway.)

I know that I didn’t want to spend my life preparing for disasters to happen. It’s like a cloudless day, beautiful as can be with the sun high and bright, and yet there’s a tiny wisp of a cloud drifting by, threatening to cast a shadow on this land. All you can do is wait for your world to dim without warning. Some clouds are larger, some smaller, and so their duration of darkness varies. Even in times where there is no major trouble happening, there is still a perpetual worry about vague uncertainties. Those uncertainties somehow are more daunting than preparing to face known disasters.

Fortunately, I don’t get homesick much because no matter how distant China can feel, I can always replicate that sense of home here. I was shocked by how similar life is here to the one I had back in China when I was in high school. Back then, I always felt the urge to compete with everyone, for everything. It felt like I was living in The Hunger Games: If I didn’t collect enough weapons or grow as strong as possible, I would vanish. Whenever things go wrong, or plans fall through, people doubt themselves for not working hard enough instead of questioning whether the system is doing them favors, or worse: it’s designed to make it even harder for them to succeed. The most upsetting thing is that I didn’t have the option of not working hard, so I lost my autonomy again, here.

Where can I go, then? Will I ever have real autonomy?

E xperts have tried to describe the push and pull of decisions international students have to make when deciding whether to stay in their “receiving” countries, or return home.

One of those is Dr. Nian Ruan from the University of Hong Kong, who in 2020 wrote an article highlighting the various factors that seemed to attract many students to Western economies. These included job opportunities, status improvement, civic freedoms, cultural tolerance, and increased quality of life. These factors also explained, to some extent, why these students aspired to remain in the United States post-graduation: to them, the economic, civic, and political culture of the West served as compelling incentives to stay.

But Ruan also discusses the resistance graduates face, known as “push factors.” On the micro level, “a protectionist recruitment system/policy” can be a large element that causes the return of international students. As Ruan writes, employers in the US prioritize permanent citizens for positions over international applicants. On the macro level, Ruan notes, the most common factors pushing Chinese international students out of the United States are “fewer promotion opportunities and more career insecurity” and “lack of career/personal network and insufficient understanding of the local regulations.”

Dr. A — whose name has been shortened to conceal her identity — is a co-undergraduate director at a four-year public university on the East Coast. Dr. A told me that many Chinese international students only came to the United States for one degree, so the duration of their programs are usually short, and students don’t have enough time to fit into the American context. This disadvantage becomes particularly apparent when international students are transitioning from school to the job market. This is the time for networking, small talk, and a coffee chat. Students lack social capital–they don’t know enough people, and they don’t know the rules–and the problem cannot be overcome by individuals making efforts. Instead, Dr. A argues that it’s the state’s fault for not supporting international students better. “The whole environment, including the campus environment, campus support, higher education environment and job market environment–are these environments friendly enough to foreign workers? All these will affect international students’ job-seeking experiences,” Dr. A said.

The potential to remain in the country and ultimately obtain citizenship was directly linked to the job-seeking experiences. “The reason many state colleges and second-tier universities were very attractive to international students was because in the United States, a degree had a natural attribute: it creates a pathway toward immigration,” Dr. A said. “People who came here ten to fifteen years ago, like us, experienced this.” After completing graduate studies, you could graduate, find a job, and your chances of staying in the states and getting a job were relatively easy. “Ten years ago, finding a job in the United States and staying wasn’t a very difficult thing to do.” Today, that is simply not the case.

I spoke with all the people mentioned in this story a month after our initial conversations to see if they had figured it out–whether they were going to stay or go. Annine Zhang, the film student, is now seeking jobs in both the United States and China, and has decided to go wherever she can find a good job. Siqi Sun, who felt uncomfortable on a New York City street, still wants to leave the United States as soon as she graduates even though she is qualified for a three-year-OPT, an international student’s dream. Jinny Zhu, who rebuked the 996 work-life in China, has been accepted by the PhD program for Clinical Psychology at Washington University. She is planning to stay in the United States for the next six years to obtain her doctoral degree. Shawn Li has moved to Washington D.C. and started his new job as an architectural designer. At the same time, Shawn is also looking for opportunities to relocate to the companies’ European branches.

Angela, the master’s degree graduate with the expiring visa, is still considering getting married for a green card.

Although it seems people are debating whether to stay in the US or go back, we don’t really have many options. Most of the decisions depend on things we cannot control: visa status, job offers, parents, and so on. We came to a so-called free country, but I still don’t know what exactly freedom actually tastes like.

Taking that “tiny step” back seems more and more tempting to me now. I don’t have much autonomy in the United States, just as I didn’t have it when I was in China. The United States isn’t under a dictatorship, or at least it isn’t yet. But if I do need to turn a blind eye to the fact that I am an “other” in this country, both in terms of my race and my gender, why wouldn’t I choose to live in a larger room where I can take an Uber everywhere?

A little while ago, I attended a monthly feminist comedy show for Chinese expats in a dim club on the Lower East Side. People took turns talking about their experiences with men, with life, with America. One of the speakers that night was Sherry Wang, a lawyer. She had gone to law school in Chicago, and she told a story about a client she met as part of her law school practicum. The man was in his sixties and had spent thirty years in prison for killing another man in a mob conflict. Sherry’s job was to get him out of prison earlier than he should’ve been. “When I got the case,” she said, “I more or less sympathized with him.

“I’m like, ‘Awww this man’s life was ruined.’

“I was too young. I looked at his profile carefully and realized that he had done two free degrees in prison, given talks to five churches, and even had two godsons.

“I, as a first-generation immigrant woman, have one degree, which of course, my whole family paid for it; I have never given a talk to a church; I have never been anyone’s role model; I don’t have a godson, and if I wanted a son, I would have to give birth to one myself (of course I don’t want one, god please let me have a daughter, thank you very much).

“Even so, I am still taking the minimum wage, helping this American male murderer to fight for his freedom.

“And in that moment, dear friends, I realized: Is it possible that he is the free one and I am the prisoner?

No matter what the final decision is — to stay, or to go — all we really want is autonomy, rather than being forced to rely on other things that we cannot decide.

“Is it possible that this prison is actually a walled city that this American male wants to walk out of, and I want to be exactly like him?” Sherry asked the crowd, a group of Chinese expats who were more or less like her. “I want to live the life of the most ordinary American male, even if he is a prisoner.” Sherry finished the show, her first ever, to thunderous applause and cheers from the audience.