American Studies by the Book

BEIJING —  Of all the developments that have colored the last 20 years of U.S.-Chinese relations, among the most important is the wave of Chinese students who have traveled to America to study.

Since 1979, when paramount leader Deng Xiaoping assumed power and opened China to the West, more than 250,000 students--the best and brightest of China’s youth--have made the academic pilgrimage abroad, at least half to the United States.

Aided by an act of Congress that granted political asylum to more than 50,000 of them in American universities following the bloody 1989 crackdown against the pro-democracy movement, the majority of Chinese students overseas never returned home.

The relation-forging effects of this academic exchange are only now being appreciated, in part because of a recent best-selling book by the son of one of China’s top leaders.

The “overseas student” phenomenon--which by one estimate touches a sixth of those graduating from China’s top schools--has spawned a genre of “I Studied in the U.S.A.” books. By far the most successful is one published in August by 37-year-old Qian Ning, former cultural reporter for the People’s Daily newspaper. On one level, the book is remarkable because Qian is the son of Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, one of the most powerful men in the country.

But even before the family connection became widely known--the author makes no mention of his famous father--the book, “Studying in the U.S.A.: The Story of an Era,” was already making waves.

When it was first launched at the Shanghai Book Festival in August, vendors instantly sold all 6,000 copies. Since then, said Qian Ning in a telephone interview, it has sold 80,000 legitimate copies and at least that many more in five pirated editions.

After witnessing the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Qian traveled to the U.S. with the intent of writing a book about the experiences of Chinese students there. “It was a very romantic notion,” he writes in the book’s preface, “in which I would walk or bicycle with my backpack down the roads described in Walt Whitman’s poetry.”

He studied for one year as a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan, with a summer-long side trip to UC Berkeley. The next five years he spent teaching Chinese literature in Ann Arbor while interviewing students and writing the book.

Unlike the other books in the genre, Qian’s work has been praised for its literary as well as its reportorial merits.

“The world before my eyes was so different from that world in Tiananmen Square,” Qian writes in one passage describing his first days in America, “that it was impossible to connect the two in my mind. . . . The contrast was so strong, the difference so huge, I wondered if, even with telephones, television and satellites, the two could actually communicate.”

Western diplomats in Beijing are avid about the book, sending drivers to the bookstalls when fresh copies arrive. “I just think the book has an honesty not found in most other books about America,” said one U.S. diplomat.

The book is recommended reading for senior Chinese officials, although Qian says that his father has not read it. Those officials who have read the book praise it in much the same language as the diplomats.

“I think it is a levelheaded look at America,” said a senior military official. “It doesn’t glamorize, nor does it demonize.”

In this respect, the book is the perfect antidote to the spate of virulently anti-American books--”China Can Say No” and its imitators--that flooded the stores earlier last year.

“To Chinese foreign students,” Qian writes, “upon arriving in America there is the feeling of being released from every kind of restraint: no work unit, no organization, no political studies, no leaders coming to have a talk with you. You can live completely freely, find your own house, cook your own food, apply for your own financial aid, choose your own job, decide your own future.”

Passages from the book were translated from Chinese by Anthony Kuhn of The Times’ Beijing Bureau.

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Beyond Their Borders

Many of China’s best and brightest have gotten an education in the United States. Journalist Qian Ning has written a best-selling book about it:

Number of Chinese who have studied abroad as of:

1978: 480

1979: 2,700

1983: 18,000

1989: 70,000

1992: 190,000

1995: 220,000

1996: 250,000*

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AN EXCERPT

ON ABUNDANCE: “Material abundance in the West causes people to have a strong sense of personal choice from a young age. From daily goods to professions, from lifestyles to politicians, the right of personal choice appears to be a matter of course. And the right of personal choice is the most basic meaning of freedom and democracy. . . . The American dream is actually a material dream----a house, a car, a dog . . . a stable job.”

* estimated

Sources: Chinese government and independent sources