Strategic competition involves more than indices of “hard power” like arms, industries, and allies. To compete effectively, governments must enlist their countries’ intellectual resources to educate citizens, inform policy, and expose rivals’ vulnerabilities. The American university system, with an aggregate endowment larger than the national economies of all but twenty countries, should impressively bolster U.S. competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).1 However, decades of complacency about the PRC inhibits universities’ contribution to national security. This problem is not new. The Cold War challenged Washington to collaborate with universities to understand and counter threats posed by the Soviet Union. That experience should guide how Washington partners with American universities to compete with the PRC. This paper outlines contemporary shortcomings in Sinology, examines government-academic cooperation in the Cold War, and compares Cold War cooperation with conditions for partnership today. Historical comparison suggests that current policymakers should engage with universities, accept a broad criteria of policy “relevance” in scholarship, look to scholarship for patterns but not predictions, and encourage scholars to critically assess policy rather than to amplify it.
The Challenge Today
For decades, scholars and policymakers assumed American economic engagement would liberalize the PRC. This consensus encouraged complacency about both PRC influence on American campuses and inattention to China scholarship. “Many China specialists and democracy theorists,” remembers Columbia University sociologist Andrew Nathan, “expected the regime to fall to democratization’s third wave” during the 1990s and 2000s.2 “Trade freely with China,” President George W. Bush averred, “and time is on our side.”3 Wealthier and stronger, bolder with neighbors abroad and harsher to dissidents at home than at any point since 1989, time seems to have benefited the PRC.
Accustomed to treating Beijing as a “normal” regime, American universities rely on the PRC’s goodwill for research and funding. American universities with interests in China are now “hostages,” according to political scientist Minxin Pei.4 Aggravating Beijing jeopardizes visas, satellite campuses in China, and access to 350,000 PRC nationals attending American universities.5 Through fronts like the China Reform Forum, a Beijing-based think tank, the PRC’s Ministry of State Security has since the late 1990s propounded China’s “peaceful rise” to American academics, analysts, and officials.6 Acknowledging the success of this influence campaign, Pei observes that most academics “want to come across as very measured” in discussing topics the PRC deems “sensitive,” such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, repression of Tibetans, and tensions with Taiwan.7 Criticism risks aggravating Beijing and losing collegial respect.8 The United States not only faces a powerful rival it fails to understand, but the institutions necessary to understand that rival are exposed to its influence.
Problems of foreign influence are compounded by educational atrophy. In 2009, the Obama administration’s “100,000 Strong Initiative” to increase undergraduate Chinese language enrollment was the last major federal investment in Chinese language education.9 Consequently, universities depend on “Confucius Institutes” for Chinese language instruction. Governed by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, or “Hanban,” a corollary of the PRC’s Ministry of Education, over 100 Confucius Institutes have operated on U.S. campuses.10 Since 2006, Hanban has invested $158 million at American universities for Chinese language education. A Government Accountability Office report contends that “a broad range of school officials, researchers, and other staff” expressed concerns that Confucius Institutes “could be narrowing the scope of dialogue.”11 Yet, absent alternative funding, the risk runs deeper than overt pressure. “We are in an austerity period,” notes Michael Gibbs Hill, director of Chinese studies at the College of William & Mary.12 Protecting language funding, like access to Chinese students, visas, and satellite campuses, depends on placating Beijing.
Recently, complacency has given way to alarm over Beijing’s power. The 2017 National Security Strategy branded the PRC a “revisionist power” working to “displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.”13 Works are now regularly published warning of a rising China, such as The Long Game by former National Security Council China expert Rush Doshi. Some academics have criticized their fields’ failures to understand China, including Princeton University’s Aaron Friedberg in Getting China Wrong. Shifts in opinion encourage, but do not ensure, better scholarship on China, nor do they ensure better government-academic cooperation. Conceding that Beijing has failed to liberalize, many experts nonetheless extol engagement with little alteration.14 Moreover, misunderstanding of key instruments of PRC power such as its intelligence services and the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inhibits analysis.15
Unfavorable comparison to the Cold War’s “anticommunist inquests” and “ideological and political conformism” discourage academic-government cooperation on national security.16 “Politics helped to provide our field with U.S. government and foundation subsidies,” recounts Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russian historian at University of California at Berkeley. Yet the price of support was “the partisan and combative nature of our area of interest and relative isolation.”17 Friedberg argues that a “Cold War mentality” would help “mobilize societal resources for a protracted economic, military, and ideological competition,” but, reflecting on Riasanovsky’s ambivalence, admits “any reference to the Cold War immediately conjures up unhappy memories of McCarthyism and Vietnam.”18 Unhappy Cold War memories foreclose opportunities to limit PRC influence, improve analysis, and deepen government-academic cooperation. Instead of reflexively shrinking from Cold War comparisons, we should examine the period’s successes and shortcomings to understand how government and scholarship cooperated when last faced with great power rivalry. Historical analysis recommends promising approaches and exposes past mistakes to inform present policy.
The Challenge Then
The United States was intellectually ill-prepared for competition with the Soviet Union. In 1939, following the surprise of the German-Soviet pact, Winston Churchill fumed that the Soviet Union (USSR) was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”19 In a 1946 cartoon, a puzzled American recites Churchill’s bon mot as he wonders at a sphinx crouching on a map of the USSR, suggesting the Soviets remained mysterious.20 Until the 1940s, Russian, Slavic, and Soviet studies at American universities lacked ambitious research agendas, financial support, or established faculty.21 Misconceptions about the USSR abounded. “Americans tended to think of the USSR as a vast melting pot” resembling the United States, historian Richard Pipes recalled.22 Having been trained by Russian emigres, the few American experts on the Soviet Union imagined it as coterminous with Russian culture, rather than as a multiethnic empire. American diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote in 1951 that “Ukraine is economically as fully integrated into the Soviet Union as Pennsylvania is into the United States.”23
Few academic experts on the Soviet Union meant few government experts. The entire U.S. government employed two dozen experts on the Soviet Union in 1946. By 1949, the CIA boasted 40 Soviet experts. Only a dozen spoke Russian.24 An intelligence audit from 1952 noted the analytical expertise of “political intelligence programs” was “insufficient to meet urgent and specialized needs and at the same time to maintain the research efforts essential in the longer term.”25 Likewise, the National Psychological Program concluded efforts to counter Soviet information operations in Europe and exert influence within the USSR were “handicapped” by the “made in America character” of programs like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.26
Moscow exploited American ignorance. Pipes recalls the Soviets manipulated the American sentiment that all countries resembled their own, encouraging belief that the Soviets would be “reassured” by expressions of goodwill.27 In a 1951 strategic reappraisal, the NSC worried that, thanks to its “elaborate worldwide propaganda machine and its unique ability to conceal the realities of the Soviet orbit,” Moscow could effectively pose “as the champion of peace and as the pioneer in many laudable social and economic endeavors.”28 Former U.S. Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze feared the Department of State “underestimated the risks which this country faces,” especially “the risk that we will suffer piecemeal defeat” through failing to counter Soviet influence.29 The early years of the Cold War exposed the shortcomings of American education and analysis on the USSR.
Fostering Government-Academic Cooperation
The advent of government-academic cooperation through Cold War area studies programs in the mid-1950s replaced the vicious cycle of underinvestment and underperformance with a virtuous cycle of mutual engagement between scholarship and policy. New structures of cooperation included federal and philanthropic investments across disciplines, promotion of interdisciplinary scholarship, scholar exchanges with the USSR, and a shared community of scholars and officials. Not simply new resources, but new relationships and ambitions, contributed to progress in education and analysis.
In the 1950s, the interdisciplinary model of “area studies” remade scholarship on the Soviet Union. The U.S. government initiated this process. During the Second World War, the Army’s Specialized Training Program (ASTP) created a template for area studies. Designed to teach languages like German, Japanese, and Russian to American officers, ASTP spurred academics to holistically teach foreign language and cultural history while stressing connections to national interests. “Instead of having a man majoring in German literature and language,” Cornell University’s ASTP director wrote, “he should major in Germany.”30 Postwar, philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation cooperated with Army-veteran academics like Geroid Robinson of Columbia University and Talcott Parsons of Harvard University to establish area studies programs.31 At Harvard, a Committee on Literature and Humanities began offering interdisciplinary tutorials on Russian culture.32 Observing progress at Harvard and Columbia, the military embraced area studies as “social sciences in one country,” mobilizing diverse disciplines to analyze specific regions or topics.33 One Air Force planner wrote to Harvard’s Russian Research Center (RRC) that “utilization of the social sciences in combating communism” made their cooperation essential.34
Governmental and philanthropic funding expanded the area studies model pioneered at Columbia and Harvard. The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1957 linked U.S. national security with investment in the sciences, languages, and foreign cultures.35 The law realized ambitions outlined by the NSC in 1952, which recommended the government undertake a “systematic and consistent” initiative to educate Americans on “the complex problems of the free world in meeting the Soviet threat” and analyze “the pattern of past and present Soviet conduct” to clarify that threat.36 NDEA funding for language training and area studies was substantial: $8.6 million in its first five years. Yet its greatest influence was stoking investment by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and, especially, Ford foundations.37 In the five years after 1957, Ford contributed over $100 million to area studies programs.38 “Never since the Renaissance has research been so lavishly financed,” historian Robert Byrnes marveled in 1964.39 NDEA and Ford grants typically revitalized extant Russian studies centers. At the University of California at Berkeley, an expanded Slavic Studies Center was reorganized under a new Institute for International Studies in 1956, using a four-year NDEA grant of $196,000 and an eight-year Ford grant of $450,000.40 At public universities like the University of Indiana, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh, new centers were launched with NDEA and Ford funding. Between 1959 and 1964, the number of Russian area studies centers grew from 17 to 37.41
Historian Samuel Baron remembers the Soviet Union was “determined to withhold the past.”42 Its history, society, economy, and culture were state secrets.43 Secrecy obstructed research: monographs on the Soviet political system such as Merle Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled depended on fragments of Communist Party archives for the Smolensk region from 1921-1937 seized by the U.S. Army from Germany after World War II.44 This changed in 1958 with the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement. First authorizing scholar exchanges between Harvard and Columbia and Soviet universities, Lacy-Zarubin then regularized exchanges through the federal- and foundation-supported Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants.45
Opening the USSR to research, if slightly, remade Soviet scholarship. Historian Marshall Shulman recalls that he returned from his year-long research trip with “a wholly more differentiated map of the Soviet universe, one full of divisions, tensions, and conflicts.46 Fainsod’s interactions with “dissident students” helped him reinterpret the Smolensk archive. Discerning state weaknesses in party records, Fainsod theorized they represented cracks in the Soviet system.47 For the U.S. government, scholar exchanges not only contributed to better research, but according to NSC-5607, were part of an “offensive” cultural policy.48 Accordingly, the Department of State organized trips, secured archival access, paired scholars with Soviet counterparts, and supported scholars abroad.49
The emergence of area studies, combined with public-private investment and diplomatic research support, established new relationships between academia and government. The interdisciplinary spirit of area studies linked scholars and policymakers. The goal of Columbia’s Russian Institute (RI) was to “serve policy” and to “solve problems.”50 Many early professors at RI were OSS, military intelligence, or ASTP veterans of World War II. Forty of RI’s MA graduates between 1948-1952 opted for government service, 50 percent more than those who earned doctorates.51 Harvard’s RRC also aligned itself with policymakers. Before opening, faculty met with CIA officials to “establish [a] continuous relationship between their organization and ours.”52 Stephen Frederick Starr, trained as a Russian historian at Princeton University, recalls that “ours was a serious enterprise, connected to the national interest.”53 Many doctoral candidates were supported by NDEA fellowships, Starr remembers. All who did research in the USSR received support from the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants (IUCTG).54 Illustratively, the distribution of social science PhD topics in the 1950s and 1960s was stable, with one distinction: a doubling of topics related to Soviet foreign policy.55
Using Cooperation at Home to Improve Competition Abroad
By the late 1950s, area studies were academically established. The field’s primary contributions to U.S. national security were expanding education and improving scholarship, exposing Soviet vulnerabilities, and scrutinizing policy assumptions. The scale of education on Russia and the USSR increased dramatically. Between 1958-1965, the number of American high school students learning Russian increased fivefold.56 Annual undergraduate degrees awarded in Russian language or literature increased from seven in 1958 to almost 500 by 1964.57 The number of doctorates completed on Russian/Soviet topics doubled between 1953-1956, and again between 1965-1972.58 In 1957, Ford concluded that public knowledge about the Soviet Union was “shockingly primitive.” Five years later it applauded the field for comprehensive growth.59
A new generation of scholars expanded the scope and improved the quality of research. In history, romantic treatments of Tsarist Russia by emigre scholars like Alexander Gerschenkron and Michael Karpovich were supplanted by the work of their students.60 Employing interdisciplinary research methods taught at Harvard’s RCC, Leopold Haimson conducted large-scale interviews to discover the depth and complexity of social tensions in pre-1917 Tsarist Russia.61 Pipes likewise made a “stunning discovery” in researching Soviet origins. Rather than treating the USSR as a vehicle for Russian nationalism, Pipes stressed that the Bolsheviks, like their Tsarist predecessors, forged a multiethnic empire which militated against centralized authority.62 In political science, Johns Hopkins University professor and future National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski connected theories of “totalitarianism” by thinkers like Hannah Arendt to the Soviet context through his concept of “the permanent purge.”63 In sociology, Alex Inkeles of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution revealed that complex societies could persist and even exert political pressure under totalitarianism.64
New scholarship uncovered vulnerabilities in the Soviet system, revising earlier assumptions about the regime’s power. Historians who visited Soviet archives like Fainsod, Starr, and Riasanovsky documented the complexity of Soviet society, its dissatisfaction with the state, and the limits on repression. Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled argued the Bolsheviks were a “monolithic and totalitarian party” whose regime was “unchanging.”65 After conducting research in the USSR in 1958, Fainsod revised his assessment. He observed the rise of a “new middle class” who were “careerists, not communists.” Their political allegiance was based on self-interest, not ideological zeal.66 Fainsod also concluded that formalistic analysis of Soviet institutional power was misguided, because “the central controls which looked so all-inclusive and deeply penetrating on paper” did not “operate with the thoroughness” attributed to them.67 Unexpected encounters enriched research. Riasanovsky found himself one afternoon preparing letters for illiterate villagers. “The greatest single impression I obtained,” Riasanovsky recalls, “was of grinding poverty.”68 Researching Leningrad’s illicit but vibrant jazz culture, Starr identified many “intricate maneuvers” which Soviet subjects used “to construct their separate realms of autonomy within the massive structures of Soviet life.”69
Scholars found that institutional dysfunction was as prevalent as social discontent in the USSR. Sociologist Barrington Moore theorized that totalitarianism “was functional for a certain stage of Soviet development, but would become dysfunctional later.”70 Starr doubted whether totalitarianism ever succeeded in crushing individual initiative. The narrative of “relentless centralization and state control” disregarded “that whenever the central state weakened, local forces turned out to be alive and well and ready to assume responsibility.”71 Pipes not only documented but exploited regime unpopularity. Invited to the University of Leningrad to present his work on Peter Struve, Pipes explained to Soviet students “how tsarist-era conservatives foresaw the miseries of a socialist/communist society, such as the one they were living in.”72 Despite authorities’ determination to prevent “provocative” questions, Pipes recounts that students “rushed forward, surrounded me, and asked all sorts of questions, most of them, indeed, provocative.”73
Academic consultation on government projects reshaped policy. The 1951 “Troy Project” convened Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard specialists in the hard sciences, psychology, and sociology to review American psychological warfare. They determined the uncoordinated multitude of agencies engaged in psychological operations risked “duplication, crossed purposes, and blown cover.” It recommended a “superboard that would plan general strategy for virtually all unconventional warfare measures.” This recommendation yielded the Psychological Strategy Board.74 “Troy Plus” reenlisted Harvard and MIT academics to assess American psychological operations. It endorsed psychological, cultural, and political operations against the Soviet Union, but quashed as unrealistic a prevalent assumption that the United States could precipitate “secession” in non-Russian Soviet republics. Exposed as unfounded, the secession scheme lost support in the Dwight Eisenhower administration.75
Decades later, Pipes helped expose deficiencies in intelligence analysis. Appointed in 1976 by CIA Director George H.W. Bush to lead a “Team B” external assessment of Soviet nuclear strategy, Pipes and his colleagues overturned the assumption that Soviet nuclear strategy was premised on deterrence. They concluded that Moscow sought a “war-winning capability.”76 Pipes faulted CIA assessments for emphasizing technical analysis of “hard data,” to the neglect of “Soviet strategic concepts.”77 The agency had engaged in “strategic mirroring,” projecting American assumptions onto Soviet decision-makers rather than attempting to “understand the Soviet mindset.”78 Strategic balance rested not only on “the relative balance of power,” Pipes explained, but “above all on the mentality and intentions” of institutions.79 The Team B report helped reorient American defense posture in the late 1970s, increasing investments in nuclear and conventional weapon programs under the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations.
Limits to Government-Academic Cooperation
The successes of Sovietology were many, but public-academic cooperation was checkered with frustrations. Federal and philanthropic largesse proved transient. In 1966, Ford announced it would reorient spending to domestic priorities and foreign direct grants. Burdened by mounting social and military expenditures, federal support declined simultaneously. External support for international studies programs dropped from a high of $48 million in 1966 to less than $6 million in 1968.80 Remaining funds were apportioned on narrower criteria of national security “relevance.” Gone were the days, Starr observes, when “most of the money” spent on Soviet experts supported “research on the seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox Church, the Muscovite capture of Kazan in the sixteenth century, or the novels of Turgenev.”81 Starr insists history “is the key to any real understanding of Russia,” but after 1966, topics receiving federal funding were Soviet defense policy, regional tensions, and elite in-fighting.82 Some programs atrophied; others acquired private support.83 In either case, government-academic partnership decreased.
Government attention was not always welcome on Cold War campuses. The ordeal of McCarthyism was especially scarring. Twenty percent of witnesses called before legislative committees investigating communist “subversion” were college teachers or graduate students.84 Failure to clear one’s name frequently resulted in termination or expulsion.85 Fear of persecution deepened. A 1955 Ford Foundation survey of 3,000 academics reported “25% of professors surveyed stated they had engaged in some form of political self-censorship.”86 Unpopular government actions like the Vietnam War repelled academics. Pipes worried in 1976 “that working with the Pentagon might be political dynamite.” Harvard professor Abram Bergson felt the “psychic costs” of working with the military outweighed its material support.87 In the late 1960s, “earnest people, of whom graduate students stood at the forefront,” Starr recalled, “were beginning to sense that the era called for them to be engaged.”88 Engagement meant “contemporary politics, Vietnam, social and generational issues, and changing values.” All involved opposition to government policies.89
Declining funding and rising hostility disrupted government-academic partnerships. Yet, absent these disruptions, the success of partnership was limited by difficulties accessing, interpreting, or basing predictions on Soviet sources. A scholar exchange program report from 1983 dryly observed that “our Soviet colleagues” tended “to react with a certain sensitivity” to “unorthodox” American research.90 Almost all American research could be denounced as “unorthodox” by Soviet authorities. Scholars such as Harvard medieval Russia historian Edward Keenan were expelled from the USSR for asking the wrong questions. Others such as Samuel Baron of the University of North Carolina were barred from archives.91 Before 1985, foreign scholars could not view Soviet archival catalogs but were required to request precise file information, meaning that research depended on Soviet bibliographies.92
Problems of access were compounded by problems of interpretation. Soviet sources were ambiguous. Stephen Kotkin notes that “non-implementation” or “creative implementation” of Soviet Politburo decisions was common, but went undocumented in archives. Verifying when and how a source reflected Soviet reality rather than regime narrative was a perennial problem.93 Party and state documents do not correspond with “policymaking,” Kotkin explains, but record “artifacts of planned, executed, or thwarted intrigues” along with “weapons of attack and/or fabrication.”94 Potential for misinterpretation is rife. American scholarship was also misled by its own assumptions. Historian Priscilla Roosevelt remembers that scholarly opinion in the 1960s assumed the “success of the Soviet experiment” in the countryside, resulting in research that misrepresented the damage of collectivization.95 Pipes faulted American scholarship for discounting Russian history and Leninist ideology in favor of foreign policy rationales when explaining Soviet behaviors.96 Inaccessible or opaque sources are immanent obstacles in studying closed regimes like the USSR. Yet access to fresh sources can only “help resolve matters of factual dispute.”97 They cannot provide an interpretative framework to assess sources’ importance.
Limited sources and fallible interpretations inhibited the predictive power of Soviet scholarship. Sovietologists failed to anticipate the collapse of the USSR. Kotkin explains historians miscast social movements like Solidarity in Poland as a continuation of past dissent within the Soviet system, like the 1921 Kronstadt strike or 1968 Prague Spring.98 Radical features of Solidarity that repudiated socialism and Soviet ascendancy, like its invocations of civil society and Christianity, went unappreciated.99 Some scholars, such as University of California at Berkeley historian Martin Malia and Pipes, highlighted ruptures in the Soviet regime during the 1980s. Yet none forecasted its collapse.100 Writing in 1990, Malia recounted that academic predictions about Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms reflected political assumptions. Conservative scholars hoped Gorbachev would cause the USSR to “repent of its evil totalitarian ways” and become a market economy.101 Their liberal counterparts “desperately hoped” Gorbachev could impart “something resembling a human face” on the socialist system. Neither understood the centrifugal forces sundering the USSR along national lines.102
Comparing Historical and Present Cases
How does the Cold War experience of government-academic partnership parallel the problems and opportunities facing the United States in competing with China today? Foreign academic influence is the most troubling discontinuity between the two cases. Soviet students never provided crucial revenue for American universities. There was never a “Pushkin Institute” affiliated with the Soviet Communist Party financing most Russian language training at American universities. Conversely, scholar exchanges with the PRC lack the engagement of the U.S. government characteristic of Cold War exchanges with the USSR. Instead, U.S. institutions today build relationships with the PRC to secure access to China.103 Yet these divergences reflect a common problem: the necessity of educating the public about a great power rival and the necessity of government leadership in this educational effort.
Many difficulties stemming from government engagement with scholarship are shared between the two cases. Political disruption at universities is one concern. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act stipulated that universities receiving Hanban funding for Chinese language programs risk losing federal contracts. Political scientist David Shambaugh contended that “there is zero…political content in the textbooks used by the Hanban.”104 A Hoover Institution report from 2018 cautioned against prohibiting Confucius Institutes, “which played a positive role in bringing Chinese language and culture.”105 The difficulties Sinologists face accessing and interpreting PRC sources mirror those of Cold War Sovietology. Beijing has recently curtailed access by expelling journalists, closing archives, and restricting topics of discussion at party meetings.106 Understanding PRC records, replete with “symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings,” resembles Kremlinology.107 Finally, after miscasting China’s trajectory for thirty years, scholars today must prognosticate with humility.
If the risks are comparable between Cold War and current government-academic cooperation, so too are the rewards. Scholarship can inform and evaluate policy proposals to compete with China. Similar to the Cold War, developing “asymmetric” strategies that capitalize on American strengths and magnify PRC weaknesses are an area for scholarly contribution to great power competition.108 The “sheer magnitude” of this challenge necessitates sustained attention beyond government.109 Like the USSR, the PRC is “determined to withhold the past.”110 Beijing suppresses discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre.111 It sanitizes memories of Maoist excesses like the Cultural Revolution.112 It misconstrues the multicultural character of Qing history to conform with modern nationalism.113 “The CCP’s obsessive insecurity,” Friedberg notes, “is an obvious point of vulnerability.”114 As with the Soviet Union, scholarship can expose a gulf between CCP rhetoric and Chinese history, exploiting anxieties behind projections of strength. External experts can assess the soundness of government policy. The Hoover Institution’s 2018 report on Confucius Institutes rejected the efforts of some lawmakers to close Institutes, instead favoring academic control and transparency to conserve educational benefits and reduce political risks.115
Conclusion: Government-Academic Cooperation for Great Power Competition Today
Competition with the PRC challenges not only the political, military, and economic pillars of American power, but the intellectual resources necessary to guide policy and educate the public. Comparison to the Cold War illustrates how the U.S. government can manage the risks and maximize the value of academic partnership.
First, scholarship abhors a vacuum. Education on Chinese language, politics, and culture occurs regardless of U.S. government involvement. Only government engagement, however, can reduce foreign influence and direct attention to national security priorities. The Cold War case suggests small investments have outsized influence. The NDEA spent less than $9 million on area studies in its first five years—0.1 percent of the 1958 defense budget.116 Proportionate government investment today in Chinese area and language studies over five years would cost $825 million, a sum twenty-six times greater than that spent under the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Program in 2023.117 Compared to investments in weapons platforms like the F-35 warplane ($1.8 trillion program sustainment cost) or the Virginia-Class submarine ($3.6 billion to build per ship), education costs little but promises a great deal.118 Drawing from the Cold War example, larger U.S. government outlays could reduce university dependence on CCP-linked organizations such as Confucius Institutes, encourage philanthropic investment, and revitalize linkages between academic and policy communities. Scholarship may abhor a vacuum, but that vacuum is inexpensive to fill.
Second, scholarship’s policy relevance is elastic. As historian David Engerman writes, Soviet experts built “an academic field, not just a policy consultancy.” Training experts on the Politburo meant supporting research on Pushkin.119 The diversity of scholars whose insights enriched government projects—not simply political scientists but historians, sociologists, psychologists, humanists, and engineers—suggests no discipline monopolizes policy wisdom. Pipes, who helped reshape U.S. nuclear posture, had no background in nuclear strategy. Yet thanks to government investments in Soviet studies, he understood the mentalities that structured Soviet behavior. The field of “New Qing history” pioneered by scholars like Evelyn Rawski apparently says little about PRC vulnerabilities. Yet in revealing the Qing Empire’s multinational characteristics, this historiography refutes treating “the Qing period as a milestone along the developmental path of China as a nation-state.”120 New Qing history indicates how the PRC is challenged by conflicting inheritances of Chinese nationalism and multinational empire, a connection scholars such as Dan Blumenthal have made in policy-focused work.121 Research into seventeenth century coastal defense does not refine assessments of People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) missile platforms. Yet works such as London School of Economics historian Ronald Po’s Blue Frontier elucidate how successive Chinese regimes sought low-cost and high-impact strategies for projecting power in the South China Sea, which seems central to Beijing’s strategy today.122 Naval analysts such as Toshi Yoshihara have begun integrating this history in their research.123 Deep exploration of the past yields unexpected but sometimes invaluable results, recommending an elastic conception of policy relevance in research.
Third, the value of scholarship to policy is in interpreting patterns, not predicting outcomes. Sovietology was no better than Sinology at forecasting political change. Sociologists could theorize that Soviet totalitarianism was doomed for dysfunction, and historians could reveal fissures between state and society. However, policymakers like Ronald Reagan who anticipated the USSR’s imminent demise were acting on intuition, not expert opinion. Oftentimes, USSR dissidents, irrespective of professional credentials, were better guides to the regime’s future than American experts.124 Soviet studies’ insights were into what existed, not what came next. The work of scholars in teaching the Russian language, exploring Russian and Soviet history, and elucidating complex factors governing Soviet state and society indicate that scholarship offers policy much by disclosing persistent factors that shape a regime’s behaviors or produce weaknesses within its system. Whatever else government-academic cooperation is expected to achieve, it would be unproductive to ask the academy to accurately forecast the PRC’s future. Other methods must be found for that.
Finally, scholarship must be supported by and supportive of national security, but not subservient to it. Cold War scholarship cooperated with but was detached from government. Some academics referenced here served in government. Others consulted on government projects or benefited from grants. All, however, spent the bulk of their careers at universities. They criticized national security strategy, offering policymakers external evaluation. After the Cold War, scholarship reinforced government consensus on the wisdom of engagement with China. With a nascent consensus on the wisdom of competition with China emerging, scholars and officials should shape a relationship in which academic opinion serves to assess rather than to amplify policy. Should government largesse for academic research grow, threats to scholarly independence may grow as well. Cold War government-academic partnership was never flawless, but it contributed to the successes of U.S. strategy in managing the Cold War’s risks. Such a virtuous partnership is possible, and increasingly necessary, between policy and scholarship today.
Image: Confucius Institute Troy University, March 16, 2018. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Confucius_Institute_Troy_University.jpg, used under Wikimedia Commons.
[1] “World Economic Outlook Database,” International Monetary Fund, accessed April 29, 2024, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/April/weo-report?; Michael T. Nietzzel, “College Endowments Saw an Average 7.7% Gain in Fiscal Year 2023,” Forbes, February 15, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/15/college-endowments-saw-an-average-77-gain-in-fiscal-year-2023/.
[2] Aaron L. Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 42.
[3] Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, 46.
[4] Isaac Stone Fish, “The Other Political Correctness: Why are America’s Elite Universities Censoring Themselves on China?,” The New Republic, September 4, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/150476/american-elite-universities-selfcensorship-china.
[5] Stone Fish, “The Other Political Correctness.”.
[6] Alex Joske, Spies and Lies: How’s China Greatest Covert Operation Fooled the World, (Melbourne and London: Hardie Grant, 2022), 90.
[7] Stone Fish, “The Other Political Correctness.”
[8] Stone Fish, “The Other Political Correctness.”
[9] Raisa Belyavina, “U.S. Students in China: Meeting the Goals of the 100,000 Strong Initiative,” Institute of International Education, January 2013, https://www.academia.edu/20061035/U_S_Students_in_China_Meeting_the_Goals_of_the_100_000_Strong_Initiative.
[10] David Bulman, “Knowing the PRC: China Watchers between Engagement and Strategic Competition,” in Essays on China and U.S. Policy, ed. Lucas Myers (Washington, DC: The Wilson Center, 2022), 161.
[11] Joshua Kurlantzick, “China’s Influence on University Campuses,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 11, 2023, https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-influence-university-campuses.
[12] Stone Fish, “The Other Political Correctness.”
[13] Timothy Heath, “America’s New Security Strategy Reflects the Intensifying Strategic Competition with China,” RAND, December 27, 2017.
[14] Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, 12.
[15] Joske, Spies and Lies, 10; Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021), 44.
[16] David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy the Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.
[17] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “My Historical Research in the Soviet Union: Half-empty of Half-full?,” in Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Cathy Frierson, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 4.
[18] Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, 169.
[19] William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill. Volume II: Alone, 1932-1940 (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1988), 456.
[20] Edwin Marcus, A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma — Churchill, photograph, [between 1946 and 1958], Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
[21] Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 14.
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