Tourism, academia and literature are symptoms that appear that the trend of ties has been reversed.
Cultural ties between the U. S. The US and China are at their lowest point after several years of decline, according to The Guardian’s investigation of official figures.
The pandemic and Covid-19 restrictions, coupled with the ongoing industrial war between the two countries, are diluting cultural exchanges, affecting attendance, academics and even the world of literature.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, cultural exchanges between the United States and China increased. Since then, tensions between the two countries, which escalated under Donald Trump and continued under Joe Biden, have reversed those trends.
Here, The Guardian examines the culture of political and economic antagonism between the superpowers.
A Western education through the wealthy Chinese has long been appreciated. The figures show that the number of Chinese scholars reading in the U. S. UU. se shot up under the Obama administration, from 98,235 in the 2008-09 school year to 350,755 in 2016-17. But the immediate increases noted under Obama have reduced Trump’s time in the White House. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to the first decline in enrollment since 2003-04.
A similar trend was observed in reverse. The number of American academics who chose to take exams in China increased, particularly in the early 2000s, before peaking in 2012. Since then, student exchanges have declined, with the pandemic causing a big drop from 11,639 American scholars in China in 2018-19 to just 382 in 2020-21.
In recent years, journalistic exchanges between the United States and China have reached new lows, with-for-tat expulsions and visa adjustments complicating the lives of foreign correspondents from both countries.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said 56% of foreign bureaus noticed delays in receiving J-1 visas for their correspondents in 2022, and that the Chinese government used covid-19 as a pretext to deny access to foreign journalists. Some 38% of journalists surveyed had Chinese resources who had been harassed or called for questioning in some way, up from 25% in 2021.
Meanwhile, the number of U. S. journalist visas issued to Chinese nationals, adding up their circle of family members, hit a record high in 2021, while only two were issued (non-essential visa facilities were disrupted due to the pandemic). In 2015, a record 1,041 were issued, however, the number has since dropped as relations between the two countries have deteriorated.
In 2020, the U. S. Department of State will be able to The US demanded Chinese media register as missions and also announced that it would reduce the number of bloodhounds allowed to paint in the offices of major Chinese media outlets in the US. UU. de 160 to 100. In November 2021, the two countries agreed to ease restrictions on hounds, but only 16 were issued in fiscal year 2022.
The cooling of relations between the United States and China has even covered the literature. Figures from the University of Rochester Translation Database show that the annual number of Chinese fiction and poetry publications translated and published in the United States has declined since 2017.
A Guardian investigation of books classified as “American” on Douban, a Chinese equivalent of IMDb and Goodreads, shows a similar trend in reverse. There were 267 U. S. books on the site published in 2017, which dropped to 146 in 2022.
While Chinese-produced films have never been more popular in the United States, Hollywood has traditionally made up a giant portion of Chinese box revenues.
In recent years, this calculation has changed, with locally produced films accounting for 85% of the Chinese market in 2022, up from less than 50% a decade ago.
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has caused the whole world to collapse, and China has imposed heavy restrictions for longer than any other country. However, figures from the I-94 arrivals program show a decline in the number of Chinese tourists to the U. S. The U. S. was in the U. S. even before the pandemic hit.
Figures for the first five months of 2023, after China reopened its borders, show that arrivals are surging, but remain well below pre-pandemic levels. Only 87,600 Chinese nationals arrived in May this year, down from 255,000 in May 2019.
The United Nations World Tourism Organization releases separate figures on the number of American tourists in China, showing numbers emerging through 2018, when the numbers began to decline.