Xi Jinping’s 2023 pledge to invite 50,000 young Americans to China over five years should be read against a China-U.S. educational exchange landscape that has become increasingly uneven and more politically visible. According to Open Doors, 265,919 Chinese students studied in the United States in 2024-25. By contrast, the latest available figure for American study abroad in China was 1,749 students in 2023-24, down from more than 11,600 in both 2017-18 and 2018-19.
The two figures are not perfect mirrors of one another because Chinese enrollment in the United States and American study abroad in China measure different kinds of mobility.
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