In the history of people-to-people diplomacy, there seem to be few wins for America.
The way people-to-people diplomacy currently works, Americans or their organizations lobby Washington on behalf of foreign powers.
Mao likely had this kind of influence operation in mind from the earliest days of Red China. After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, says China Daily, “the country’s leadership launched people-to-people diplomacy, which helped ease the diplomatic blockade imposed by the West on China, strengthen ties with people of [other countries] and promote mutual trust with other countries, and win international support.”
Notice that it’s a one-way street, with all the benefits for one side.
China and friends
The communist Global Times is explicit on this point: “Friendship, which derives from close contact between the people, holds the key to sound state-to-state relations…. [M]any media and public opinions in the US [are] filled with incorrect perceptions of China…. For these American young people, all they need to do is come to China, walk around and see for themselves, and they will immediately form their own understanding and judgment of China. Some people in the US are afraid of letting them understand the real and comprehensive China, calling it the ‘charm offensive’ by China. In fact, they are afraid of their narrow and demonized image of China being exposed.”
This seems to be a darker version of the stated intentions of President Eisenhower.
“In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the U.S. People-to-People Program as part of his campaign to win the Cold War,” reports historian Anna Fett. “The program encouraged Americans as private citizens to create contacts with foreign peoples in an effort to foster ‘a sympathetic understanding of the aspirations, the hopes and fears, the traditions and prides of other peoples and nations.’ ”
The Eisenhower version almost looks like a two-way street. But it’s not. Our trusty people-to-people “friends” in China are not, for instance, going to lobby their government in favor of American tariffs or freedom of the South China Sea or anything else not on the Chinese policy menu.
So what do Americans get out of such people-to-people diplomacy? They get to ride their hobby horses, for one thing. The China-U.S. High Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchange, now apparently defunct, was started in 2010 and by 2016 had signed agreements on “education, science and technology, culture, public health, sports, women and youth.” For a bureaucracy, an official, or a nonprofit agency, agreements are achievements.
The power
Busywork, you say? But headlines attract interest. It’s why nonprofits can raise money off of Eisenhower-level idealism. Thus we have the 100,000 Strong Foundation, which “holds network-making power and uses it to strengthen public diplomacy.”
“In 2009,” recounts Di Wu, student of public diplomacy and East Asia, “President Barack Obama proposed the 100,000 Strong Initiative for China during his visit there, and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the founding of the 100,000 Strong Foundation, a nonprofit, in early 2013. Both the Initiative and the Foundation aim to increase the number of American students studying abroad in China to 100,000 within four years, and to increase the diversity of the student body. Rather than creating a separate study abroad program, the 100,000 Strong Foundation functions as a tool to implement the Initiative by building a social network.”
The following is not a typo: in the 2021-22 school year, “there were 211 US students pursuing academic credit in the Chinese mainland, the lowest number in a decade,” according to China Daily. The Economist adds that with easing of pandemic restrictions, the number is now around 800 American students, still way down from a high of 15,000 or so in the 2011-12 school year. This lack of progress may seem like bad news for the 100,000 Strong Initiative, but it would make for a great fundraising message. Help us meet our goals! Chip in!
People-to-people exchanges were always doomed to become organization-to-organization affairs with respect to which public interest is low and what counts as wins are new agreements, number of visits, and grip-n-grin pics.
Any actual people-to-people results could never amount to much for America.
Tall order
Thought experiment: take the Communist Party rolls to be a total of 100 million. Now imagine enrolling 100 million Americans in a person-to-person matchup with individual party members (and no language barriers, as long as we’re imagining things). Would it be reasonable to pretend that 10% of the communists might be positively influenced by their counterparts after a few visits? Could 10 million charmed communists effect any major policy changes over a period of a generation or two or even three?
No. That’s not how their system works.
How then could a smattering of random interactions deliver enough good feeling to change communist policies?
How hard will those 800 American students in China have to schmooze in order to get us substantive, positive results? □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
