Honoring Jimmy Carter: When Chinese students arrived in the US after the Cultural Revolution - with Thomas Fingar

It became clear, certainly by 1978, that educational exchanges, access to training, export controls — these were going to be litmus tests of US-China relations.

Jan 11, 2025

A big event this week - other than the wildfires in Los Angeles - is the funeral of Jimmy Carter. While the troupe of US-China relations usually dances around Nixon, Kissinger and Ping-Pong Diplomacy, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is Jimmy Carter who actually managed to normalise US-China relations in 1979 after three decades of mutual isolation. The legacy of that decision remains under debate, especially in the prevailing geopolitical winds, but its significance cannot be doubted.

I’m dedicating this week’s newsletter to Jimmy Carter. One key aspect of Jimmy Carter’s normalisation of US-China relations is the opening of the American education system to Chinese students. As a Chinese visiting scholar in the US, I have benefitted from the arrangement going back to the early days of the Carter administration. The famous 3am phone call between Frank Press and Carter led to an absolute blooming of Chinese students in the US, currently standing at an approximate figure of ~300k. The possibility of studying in the US sent a message of hope and progress to a country reeling from the destructive aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and communist disruptions. True, in the early days (and still today), opportunities to study abroad were limited. Nonetheless, the possibility created aspirations and cooperative spirits among the people of China towards the USA, and provided them with an opportunity to completely transform their own lives.

For this story, I can think of few more qualified to speak than Dr. Thomas Fingar, whom I interviewed back in March 2024. Dr. Fingar is a Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89).

For our story today, his most relevant role is perhaps the co-director of the US-China Education Clearinghouse in 1981. The Clearinghouse was an initiative under the National Academy of Sciences in the 1980s that facilitated academic and cultural exchanges between the United States and China, helping students, scholars, and institutions navigate educational collaboration. It served as a central resource for information, logistical support, and partnership-building during a period of rapidly growing bilateral ties in education. Through Dr. Fingar’s personal experience, we get a sneak peek behind the scenes and understand how Chinese students were regularised into the American education system, the hurdles that were overcome, and the generation of China scholars that played an instrumental role in engaging China. We will also touch on Stanford's own history of building bridges with China from the 70s through its influential US-China Relations Program.

I never had the chance to meet President Carter in person, and I know a debate exists on whether engaging China was sound or disastrous. Personally, I would like to say thank-you for the opportunity his policy afforded me. Whether his policy eventually proves to be in America’s own interest, I will leave it for others to judge.

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“Bring back the Gang of Four! Free the Gang of Four!” Stanford Stalinists shouted at the Chinese scholars.

Could you tell us about your first trip to China?

My first trip to the mainland was in March of 1978 with a Stanford group organised by the U.S.-China Relations Program at Stanford. Doug Murray was the director, and I was the deputy. It had been established by John Lewis in political science and Victor Lee in law school in 1975. This group consisted of Bill Miller, the provost at the time; the chairman of the board of trustees, Ed Ginston; half a dozen faculty members; and four graduate students.

The U.S.-China Relations Program was established to take advantage of the reality that almost everything going on in the relationship at that time was touched by Stanford.

We wanted to enable Stanford folks who had not been to China. Also, many Stanford people participated in quasi-official delegations since the Ping-Pong Diplomacy and until its normalization in 1979. Almost every quasi-official delegation from the United States had somebody from Stanford on it. Almost every Chinese delegation to the United States came to Stanford, partly because of the San Francisco Airport and partly because of Stanford’s reputation. They wanted to see Silicon Valley.

Even back then?

Even back then. The U.S.-China Relations Program was established to take advantage of the reality that almost everything going on in the relationship at that time was touched by Stanford.

I think, without question, Stanford had the best China studies program in the world at that time. It had very good China expertise but also medical experts, engineers, scientists, and other luminary faculties. The program was established to make non-China faculty smarter about China and to use their expertise to inform the China Studies faculty.

Who decided to form that group? How did Stanford become such a major place for China studies?

Stanford had one of the first courses in the U.S. on China in the 1940s. I don’t know what personalities played a role, but it didn’t have a lot of Chinese people because the image of Stanford in China was linked to the exploitation of labourers on Stanford’s railroad.

In the early ‘60s, Stanford decided it would be the best in the world in a limited number of disciplines. In Asia, that was Japan and China, but no Korea, Southeast Asia, or South Asia.

I was at Cornell at the time. Stanford raided Cornell in 1967 and ‘68. John Lewis, a political scientist; Bill Skinner; Art and Margery Wolf from anthropology; Steve Olson from sociology; and John Wang from the library, from the China collection, all moved from Cornell to Stanford, which had already begun to build on China.

John Lewis was hired specifically to build the China piece. He established the Center for East Asian Studies. Victor Lee was hired as part of the build-up. Both Lewis and Lee were involved in the National Committee for U.S.-China Relations, the quasi-official body that still exists in New York, and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC, which were both established in 1966 by a small number of academics, including Bob Scalapino at Berkeley and Lewis at Cornell. I became involved because I was here at Stanford and available — arms and legs to run up to the airport and greet people.

It became clear, certainly by 1978, that educational exchanges, access to training, export controls — these were going to be litmus tests of how far the United States were willing to support reform and opening approaches to modernisation in China

It’s what put me in contact with several Chinese counterparts. Some of those people I grew up with professionally. They went up in their system as I did in ours, and some of them are still friends. I’ll see [Peking University professor] Wang Jisi next week (note: March 2024).

It’s interesting to hear how a small group of China scholars became so influential in driving the operations of U.S.-China relations.

With that trip, we became the trial balloon for issues of normalisation. Partly thanks to Mike Oksenberg, who taught here and was in the White House, in the Carter National Security Council. He was the China director.

And partly, thanks to the Chinese side, they needed an unofficial focal point to discuss concrete issues. It became clear, certainly by 1978, that educational exchanges, access to training, export controls — these were going to be litmus tests of how far the United States were willing to support reform and opening approaches to modernisation in China, which could not have gotten off the ground without the relationship with the United States.

That was recognised, but the federal government in the United States has only five colleges, all military academies. There simply was no practical way to explore requisites for sending students and researchers and joint projects with the federal government.

It’s a different system from China’s.

Very different system. Both the Chinese and U.S. governments treated us as the place to explore concrete problems, as we were a known quantity and out of respect for this university.

Back to that March 1978 trip. It was a familiarisation trip. We went to five or six cities and saw all of the predictable things at the time. Besides the touristy stuff at the Great Wall, we went to a state farm in Heilongjiang, and we heard the before and after the Cultural Revolution stories, how bad the Gang of Four was and how many improvements had been made.

While our group was there, there was a parallel set of discussions between me and a guy named “John.” He clearly was a princeling given his Rolex watch and the cut of his suit. He was about my age, around 30. I sat next to him on every flight, every train trip, every meal. We discussed specific questions relevant to academic exchanges — health insurance, testing of English language ability, whether it would be a special national program. We said, “Absolutely not; this has got to be open to all American universities and all students on it.”

Timing was important. We got there right after the 1978 National Science Conference. It became a national goal to revitalise science as the four modernizations said. We came in as a pathway.

Deng Xiaoping was big on science and technology and learning from America.

Yeah. We saw an opportunity to explore the details of normalising relations. I had been in the Ford administration, named to head an outside team to develop a path to normalization. That didn’t go anywhere but was picked up by the Carter administration.

In August, Lewis, Lee, and Murray timed their trip to China to the same day as the National Science and Technology Delegation went to China, headed by Frank Press, the President’s Science Advisor, the highest S&T government delegation we’ve ever sent any place. Murray and Lewis landed within an hour of when the Frank Press delegation took off. Our signal of willingness to support was received and acted on in Beijing. Lewis and Murray had meetings and conversations on the phone to me back here about what departments might be able to accept people.

I went back in October with a specific purpose. I was going to discuss with a different interlocutor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Two days into our wrestling with the last issues, the Chinese asked me to extend my visit because they expected that we would reach an agreement and I could begin interviewing people as candidates for Stanford.

I had been checking in daily with our liaison office because when I was in Beijing, an official delegation in Washington was negotiating the government-to-government exchange agreement. I had met with Zhou Peiyuan, the Chinese head of it, at the airport in San Francisco on my way to Beijing and his way to Washington with State Department people, to sync and ensure the same understanding on things like who’s going to determine English language ability. The Chinese still insisted on deciding language adequacy for students and scholars, and we said, “That’s not going to work.”

By the fourth day’s end, we had no more open issues. I called Stape Roy, the charge at our liaison office. “I’m ready to sign this thing. What do you want me to do?” He said, “I got no guidance. It’s too bad you couldn’t reach me.” I understood what that meant.

What did it mean?

Sign it.

I’m on the hook because I signed it without formal authorisation. But he said, “We gotta get this done.” So it was signed between Stanford and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The next day, I flew to Hangzhou to start interviewing people. The first six arrived on campus on November 12th. That’s how fast it was. We wanted to lock this in and demonstrate that this is a done deal.

We expected that the government-to-government agreement would conclude at the same time. It didn’t. My assessment of why it didn’t happen was that the details for the third plenum had not yet been nailed down. The Chinese public position was that they could not send students to the United States without an embassy to protect them from the dangers of America.

Besides, had there been an agreement restoring academic exchanges before the normalisation and reform and opening, it would look like Beijing had caved on a key precondition for the normalisation of U.S.-China relations, namely that the U.S. should end formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which Mao once proposed to Nixon. Clearly, in my judgment, Deng’s clique didn’t want to do that. So the government-to-government agreement was signed the day after the announcement at the third plenum. There were no changes; it just went through. By that time, the second group of Chinese was already at Stanford.

How did you select the students to get to Stanford so fast?

The Chinese Academy of Sciences first selected them. Out of the dozen that I interviewed, we found places for six. We called them “non-matriculated graduate students” because that way we could bring them right away. If they’d been regular students, they would have had to apply. And visiting scholars would take a year. The category already existed at Stanford and other universities. You pay your money, go to classes but are not in a degree program.

A year or so later, a Chinese American professor accused me of insulting and demeaning the Chinese people by calling these obviously mid-career scientists “graduate students.” There wasn’t much I could do about it.

The next couple of times I was in Beijing, I tried to contact my interlocutor. And it was always, “He’s not here.” I finally did see him a couple of years later. I said, “What the hell was going on?” He said, “You know what we agreed, you know why we agreed, you know why we did it that way.”

“Why did nobody from the academy say, ‘this is all cool, this is what we did to get started.’?”

He says, “You know China, and you can understand it. To protect the agreement, we had to blame you. If we took any responsibility, we would have had to renege on the agreement.”

The people coming were actually quite established already.

We didn't dispute that at all. They can apply. That’s perfectly fine. If you want to get them there right now, “non-matriculated graduate students” is the only way to do that without changing the rules. The arrangements for China had to be exactly the same as for every other country. We went through how damaged the system was by the Cultural Revolution, and I’d say, “Maybe, but we didn’t do the Cultural Revolution. You did that.”

Of course, the Chinese are more used to having one party to make calls on specific issues and creating exceptions. That wasn’t the case at Stanford.

No. If this is going to be sustainable over time, applicants from China must meet the same criteria as applicants from anywhere else. That was not the desired answer. It took a long time to get recognition on their part. It didn’t matter what university they were going to talk to. They weren’t going to set up a privileged category for those who’ve screwed up education through government policy. Even arguing that we ought to have an Affirmative Action program to compensate for Mao’s decisions would have been a non-starter. In no way would we have 360,000 or 370,000 Chinese students here right away. Anyway, we got past the bumps.

What was it like welcoming the Chinese students when they finally arrived in November 1978?

They were pretty excited and nervous, like people in the delegations. All of them, probably by instruction and culture, were not going to demonstrate excitement that the United States might actually be significantly ahead. China was supposed to have all of the benefits of 30 years of New China achievements. It was very muted. They were a little bit overwhelmed by the life aspects. The selection in the grocery store, for example.

The first group on campus arrived on the Friday before the big football game at Berkeley. We were walking across campus up toward Tresider. The Stanford Dollies went past — the cheerleaders — to do a rally. “Who are they? How come they’re wearing those costumes?” — “They’re students.” — “Really? Why are they dressed like that?”

Then another group called Venceremos, which was a Stalinist group, spotted them as Chinese, and began to chant, “Bring back the Gang of Four! Free the Gang of Four!” So, their first hour on campus was mind-blowing.

I explained the pep rally. Then we saw a religious fundamentalist. Jimmy Carter had just admitted to having lust in his heart. The guy asked the students, “Do you approve of Carter’s admission of lust? Do you approve of sin?” Of course, a bunch of students said, “Yeah, good for sin!” As we walked away they said, “They were criticising the president, commenting on something that… I guess they could really do that.”

We walked further to lunch, and we came to a guerrilla theater with a bunch of Iranian students — there used to be a lot of Iranians here until the ‘79 revolution. It was a “Down with the Shah” demonstration. The students knew enough to know that Iran was one of China’s best friends. The last foreign official to meet with the Shah was Hua Guofeng. So the “Down with the Shah” stuff was jarring.

Welcome to America.

We spent a lot of time trying to ease their transition. It was an impressive set of people. I remember two computer scientists debating what language to use for computer science in China. One argued for English. That’s what all the software was written in. “We can get a fast start on this. We don’t have to redevelop it. And besides, to do things in Chinese characters would eat up all the memory.”

And the other one said, “That’s the short term, but it’ll never be for the people. It would never be a tool that can be used by ordinary people, by all kinds of industries and education.” It was actually a sensible debate to have. It was decided immediately because you couldn’t program in Chinese. But that was the kind of thing they were wrestling with while being here.

Bringing bureaucracy up to speed

In 1981, when Congress appropriated money to the National Academy of Sciences and to the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs to prepare materials for American universities receiving applications for visiting scholars and students and sending people to China. Most universities knew nothing about China. So my classmate, Mary Bullock, who headed the CSCPRC, asked me to go to Washington.

Did she invite you to head the U. S.-China Education Clearinghouse?

Yeah, I co-chaired it with Linda Reed from National Association of Foreign Student Affairs. We published guidance for American schools. We produced seven, eight handbooks on things like: How do you interpret an application from somebody that said they learned physics on their own from a book they found while they were, sent down to the countryside? What's the meaning of a degree from somebody who graduated from the Third Institute of Railway Engineering? What the hell is that? And what do you make of an application that says, “I didn’t actually go to college, but I studied physics on my own while I was assigned to a pig farm in Gansu”? Or, “What the hell does a degree mean that comes from a second college of railroad engineering?” We did work on that. We also prepared materials for hosting the Chinese: how to receive a Chinese tenant, how to teach English as second language, etc.

And how do you think you managed there?

I think we basically did the job. These things were half-lives. They served a purpose for a time. Later, we disbanded the U. S.-China relations program. The Chinese went nuts. However, things were growing out of control by 1983. We had a hundred exchange visitors a year. I started getting questions from Chinese people from all over the US. “Why are you calling me? You're in Chicago, I'm out here.” — “The Ministry of Education gave us your phone number. So if we have a problem, contact Fingar in the Stanford program.” That's it. I couldn’t handle that. I had no intention of worrying about the guy's health insurance in Chicago. So we shut it down.

Our goal from the beginning was to get the relationship on a normal footing so that dealings with China were like dealings with any other country. They'll take the same English test as everybody else who wants to come to the United States. And we had to work our way through that stuff. And we did.

It didn’t take too long before the numbers shot up. I learned five or six years later when I was Chief of the China Division at the State Department that we actually didn’t know how many Chinese students were here.

Because the universities weren’t collecting the statistics?

No, it was because the Immigration and Naturalization Service had always had a “One-China Policy.” They didn’t distinguish Chinese between Singaporeans, Taiwanese, Cantonese, or the mainland.

Singapore?

It was all just “ethnicity: Chinese.” Nobody had ever given instructions to people stamping visas that they ought to separate one kind of Chinese from another.

Riding the tide of China studies and US-China relations

I find this period of history interesting, probably because I’m an overseas Chinese student myself. But also I know there’s historical value in this story. The educational exchanges started even before…

Before the formal restoration of diplomatic relations.

Exactly — So I just wonder what that process looked like.

In ‘78 it was all informal. I had phone conversations, mostly with Oksenberg at the White House. That was in part, I believe, done to avoid or minimise the likelihood of resistance to normalising with China, which had stopped it in the Ford Administration. They didn’t want a paper trail that could be exposed to criticism and be a distraction and disrupt it. It was smart politics. So it was all informal.

There were visits and exploratory things by other universities, but nobody else had the equivalent of the U.S.-China Relations Program here. The Chinese figured that out pretty quickly.

So this was a Track Two diplomacy initiative.

Yeah, it was. We never created many or long-lasting special channels or arrangements. It wasn’t weird that Stanford was a key player. Serendipity played a big role, but it could have been Cornell or Yale if they had a China program.

We were in a lucky period in history. And we were the proverbial one-eyed man in a group of blind men. We knew something when, to most people, China was a complete mystery.

That’s so fascinating. Just imagine the small group of scholars back in the ‘60s and ‘70s who were studying China - an obscure place they couldn’t go and didn’t have the hindsight of what’s to come. Yet, they ended up creating such an impact with the absolute blooming of the China field and the academic entrepreneurship of the China scholars.

The real pathfinders showing the light in the dark were the generation above us — Scalopino at Berkeley, Lewis here, Bob Feuerwerker at Michigan, Dick Solomon at Michigan, and Oksenberg. And people on the right too: Dixie Walker at South Carolina, Gaston Sigur at GW, Chalmers Johnson at Berkeley, who were more in the “Know your Enemy” mode than “Build Bridges.” But they agreed that ignorance was not a friend. They deliberately told us to take certain opportunities and assignments, more than “Go get tenure at some place and hope for the best.” I don't think very many of us worried about tenure. We were gonna get jobs, publish, and get tenure. I don’t remember anybody fretting about that. We were in a lucky period in history. And we were the proverbial one-eyed man in a group of blind men. We knew something when, to most people, China was a complete mystery.

And back at Stanford, there was a group of China specialists emergin: you, Harry Harding, John Lewis, Victor Lee, Douglas Murray. What was that circle like at Stanford?

It was a great; there were more: Lyman Van Slyke, Hal Kahn, Bill Skinner, Arthur Wolf. There was a big contingent that worked on China. The Center for East Asian Studies was the focal point. That was where people came together: faculty and students from all kinds of departments, as well as the China and Japan crowd. By and large, we interacted far more as students of East Asia than we did as, in my case, political science. And that was true in sociology, anthropology, history, etc.

We didn't become China specialists to write the world's greatest books. We became China specialists to change the relationships, understanding and American policy.

Did you guys work together later in your professional careers beyond Stanford?

Many of us had atypical careers. We didn't just go to be professors and write articles for The China Quarterly. Harry built programs at the Wilson Center and the Brookings Institution. Lampton and I both did time on the Committee on Scholarly Communication. Mike Lampton headed the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Mary Bullock was at the Committee on Scholarly Communication. Halsey Beemer was there before he built the education program for China at the World Bank. And I went to the State Department.

John Berninghausen joined the Middlebury’s intensive Chinese language program. We were activists. We didn't become China specialists to write the world's greatest books. We became China specialists to change the relationships, understanding and American policy.

Were there other programs like the Stanford one where it became a training ground for future leading China specialist in policy?

There was Berkeley, which we had a joint center with. The anti-war Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars brought us together in ways that don't happen now. The programs at Columbia, Harvard, and Michigan were still nascent and much smaller, in part because Stanford had vacuumed up the talent.

Berkeley was larger initially and had good people doing contemporary China. Several at Berkeley were more hostile towards the PRC than the Stanford folks. But, Bob Scalapino and Chalmers Johnson were influential. I think Scalopino was active in establishing the national bodies to build relations, such as the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the CSCPRC.

A bridge between Beijing and Washington via Stanford

How did Stanford build its relationship with China?

John Lewis was a force of nature when it came to studying, activism, and engaging with China. He was so personable. Delegations came here, and he basically built friendships. The early ones were with the military. The U.S. China Relations Program — APARC now — was an offshoot of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, and focused on nuclear and security issues.

The major national organisations in New York — National Committee on U. S.-China Relations, and CSCPRC had boards headed by Stanford people. And where do you go if you’re organising something for the National Committee on the West Coast? You do it here, right?

We weren’t the only ones, but we recognised that S&T and education exchanges were going to be symbolically critical. We helped signal that the U.S. would support China’s education and S&T efforts with the condition of opening up business and educational exchange opportunities. I started writing with Genie Dean, and our writing fed into Washington discussions to seize the window of opportunity with China. The Chinese assumed we as individuals were more connected in Washington than was actually the case.

And how did the U.S.-China Relations Program at Stanford maintain its connection with Washington? It’s pretty far from the policymaking in D.C.

In the Ford administration, the State Department came to the U.S.-China Relations Program to ask us to play a role in normalization. I’m not sure why, other than how thin the expertise was in Washington because of McCarthyism. Inside the government they had nothing like the numbers of China people that are there now.

The people who were there were older. They had come up not as China people, but as foreign service officers, national security people. And they knew us from testifying on the same panels for Congress. Lewis had traveled with congressional delegations. Victor Lee had escorted the ping pong team to the White House.

Then when Carter became president, Mike Oksenberg, who had been here, became the China guy at the NSC. Mike focused on his former colleagues at Stanford. It was a natural thing to do. And the Chinese, I’m convinced, always misunderstood. Sometimes we’d meet as individuals, and other times as part of Washington. They thought we were officials pretending to be academics.

That’s perhaps how they operated.

Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. Fingar was either a government official, or related to somebody important, or both. Cause that’s the way they worked, right? And they were wrong on both counts, but it worked to our benefit. The Stanford connection then became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

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Corrections

I misstated in the introduction that Carter and Deng had a 3am phone call to discuss Chinese students in the US. The 3am phone call was in fact between Jimmy Carter and Frank Press, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, who met with Deng in Beijing and upon Deng’s request of sending students to America. This fact is often misquoted (as I did) to be between Carter and Deng. I thank Dr. Liu Yawei of Carter Center for the correction.

Dr. Fingar pointed out that the China scholar at Stanford was Victor Lee, not Victor Nee, a different China scholar at Cornell. And his co-author at Stanford US-China Relations Program was ‘Genie Dean’, not ‘Gene Dean’ as I spelt it.

I thank both Dr. Liu and Dr. Fingar for their kind corrections.

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