Big news recently in the study abroad in China field. From the Evan Osnos
blog post “Rhodes East: Why is the Schwarzman Scholarship in China?” (here):
This week, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the
Blackstone Group, invoked Rhodes’s gift as the inspiration behind a large new
scholarship for study not in America
but in China.
He is hoping that familiarity with the world’s rising superpower will blunt
growing American anxiety about changes in status. “Anger can lead to trade
problems, and ultimately to military confrontation,” he told me. “We had to
find a way to stop or ameliorate that situation.” The scholarship will draw two
hundred students a year to a one-year English-language master’s program at a
dedicated new college inside Tsinghua
University. Twenty per
cent of the winners will be from China,
forty-five per cent from America,
and the remainder from elsewhere. Schwarzman is giving a hundred million of a
personal fortune estimated at $6.5 billion, and raising another two hundred
million largely from blue-chip companies with big investments in China, to
create an endowment that the Times
calls “one of the largest single gifts to education in the world and one of the
largest philanthropic gifts ever in China.”
Note that although the program is in China, it will be in English. But
Schwarzman’s reasons are right on: we need leaders in the US and elsewhere who will understand China better. Again
from Osnos’ interview:
But the world has certainly changed, and one of the things that was really
driving me to do this is that I could see the negative attitudes that people
had toward China
were bubbling. The financial crisis, where growth rates in Europe went to zero
or worse— everything went down; jobs in the United States have been very slow
to come back. By the same token, in China they’re growing, at that
point, nine per cent a year. And meanwhile the West is quite damaged and
remains damaged from a job-creation point of view.
And I was convinced that that would create frustration in the West, and
frustration would lead to anger, and that anger can lead to trade problems, and
ultimately to military confrontation. And if China was going to grow at two to
three times the [rate of] so-called developed countries, that within two
decades, if those trends continue, they’d go from the No. 2 economy in the
world to the No. 1, and whatever problems you are seeing today in these areas
of frustration would be that much greater. And at a certain point, it seemed
logical to me that you’d start to have some really bad things with a much
higher probability of occurring. We had to find a way to stop or ameliorate
that situation.
And I looked at this idea, this type of program, as a
way to produce people who would have that kind of understanding of China that they wouldn’t have had, as they go
back to their regular lives—to observe what’s happening in China and
interpret it to their constituencies and their industries and their world. This
network, at maturity, will be ten thousand kids; some will be seventy-five
years old, but that’s a lot of people, spread around the world at a very high
level. And so they can react to China,
interpret what they’re doing. They can tell the Chinese that they’ve overdone
it in certain cases, and they can also form their own global network to deal
with other issues, whether they’re global or bilateral, because they’ll know
people who are, I guess you would say, more kindred souls, who have a shared
experience. So that’s what’s behind this.