Most Americans are focusing on the short-term due to the upcoming presidential election, but one has his gaze fixed firmly on the future. Stephen Schwarzman is hoping to help foster good long-term relations with China via the Schwarzman scholarship, which launched officially last month.
Schwarzman is the billionaire chief executive of Blackstone private equity group in New York, and conceived of the scholarship in 2013. Over 100 Schwarzman scholars have already been selected: 45% American, 20% Chinese and 35% from the rest of the world. They are headed for a one-year master’s programme at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the plan is that 200 students will go annually in future.
Schwarzman claims the scholarship looks for students who are “likely to be global leaders, in politics, business or science”, and who are potentially in a position to influence their country’s relations with China, with the ultimate hope of ensuring peace with the world’s emerging superpower.
This suggests its motivation is to address the so-called “Thucydides’ trap”, the theory that suggests rising powers tend to fight with ruling powers. However, as research on the history of foreign study shows, similar schemes in the past have had little effect – or have even backfired, in ways that still speak to us today.
Winning hearts and minds?
In 1909, following China’s failed anti-foreignor Boxer Rebellion (1889-1901) which tried to drive out Western influence, the US used some of the reparations China then paid them to fund Chinese students attending American universities (as well as to help found Tsinghua University). But the wish that the Chinese students might return from the US and build their country along American lines was destined to crash upon the rocks of war and revolutionary communism.
After the first world war, philanthropists again pinned their hopes on reducing tension between countries by sending young people abroad to study. John D Rockefeller Jr funded houses throughout the US to bring foreign students together, and a similar project was launched in London.
Rockefeller described the venture as a great force for peace in the world. His London counterpart, Mary Trevelyan, hoped that international students would rebuild a world based on “trust and tolerance between one nation and another”. Again, the notion that future leaders could help prevent another war proved tragically idealistic.
Then there were the initiatives that didn’t merely fizzle out, they backfired spectacularly. As it turned out, introducing young people to new ideas had a revolutionary effect.
Reflecting the racial and cultural biases of the time, British education in south Asia in the 19th century was designed to produce men “Indian in blood and colour” but English in sensibility and intellect. Some hoped that a period of study in England could produce collaborators to help run the empire. In reality, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leading nationalists of India and Pakistan, were all educated in England.
Of course, there are many differences between the Schwarzman programme and earlier foreign study schemes. For one, Schwarzman brings students to the emerging power rather than to New York or London, an innovative twist. It has enlisted an impressive array of advisers, academic staff and guest speakers, including the former US secretary of state Colin Powell, and the Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma. It aspires to immerse students in Chinese culture and politics.
Yet for those who do become global leaders, who will perhaps one day decide questions of war and peace, the jury is out on how their year in Beijing will shape them.
The China effect
Ironically, the inaugural class of this programme begins its studies in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign spearheaded in the UK by a South African Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford to take down a statue of founder of the long-standing scholarship programme from which he has benefited. Cecil Rhodes, whose legacy took promising students to Oxford from around the world, had hoped the fund would foster imperial unity. But 100 years later, his statue has been a rallying point for those decrying the legacy of colonialism.
Schwarzman’s scholars might turn out to be more appreciative of their benefactor’s endowment. But a number of questions remain about the overarching idea that such a scheme can mould more peaceful international relations.
Is a one-year programme actually enough to have a real impact? And how will foreign scholars react to Chinese censorship and political repression? Could exposure to China’s economic success – seen against a backdrop of slow growth in Europe, gridlock in the US congress, and the flowering of extremist movements around the world – tempt some students to consider the merits of Beijing’s authoritarian political system?
With nationalism on the rise and China re-ordering the league table of global power, any effort to diffuse tension should be welcomed. Yet as the ghosts of Rhodes, Rockefeller and others remind us, the results might be quite different from Schwarzman’s original aims.
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