Educational Exchange

History of the Fulbright Program in China

The Fulbright Program, designed to promote mutual understanding between the United States and the rest of the world, resulted from legislation sponsored by Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Fulbright's ambitious goal was to prevent the recurrence of the devastation that he had seen in Europe and Asia through an educational exchange program that would increase mutal understanding around the world. From a modest program that brought 35 students and a single professor to the United States in 1948 and sent 65 Americans abroad, the Fulbright Program has grown into a global effort with some 4,400 grantees from the U.S. and over 140 other countries participating yearly. To date, over 275,000 people have taken part in Senator Fulbright's vision. Funding for the program comes from an annual appropriation made by Congress and participating governments. Host institutions, both in the U.S. and abroad, contribute through cost-sharing, salary supplements, tuition waivers and university housing.

China was the first country to participate in the new Fulbright Program, when a Fulbright accord was signed by the then Nationalist Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Shiqie and American Ambassador J. Leighton Stuart on November 10, 1947. By August 1949, 27 American scholars and students and 24 Chinese students and scholars had taken part in the exchange. The program was suspended in 1949 when the Peoples Republic of China was established. Upon normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, the Fulbright program was revived as part of the official exchange relationship under the general U.S.-China agreement on cooperation in science and technology.

After thirty years without contact between the Chinese and American academic communities, the early years of the Fulbright lecturer program focused on English teaching, American literature and history at four institutions in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. At that time China's drive for modernization was the main engine powering its educational exchange programs with the U.S.: nearly all were aimed at the acquisition of western technology and scientific expertise. To balance and broaden the exchange, the American Lecturer Program and the Chinese Research Program, in 1983, were formally dedicated to advancing American Studies, as that discipline is defined by Chinese academia, including American approaches to history, literature, law, journalism, business, economics, political science, sociology, philosophy and international relations. Since then, the program has expanded to include nearly fifty institutions throughout the country, most of them universities under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education.

Current funding levels support the exchange of approximately twenty U.S. Lecturers, some eighty U.S. Research Scholars, Graduate Students and Recent Graduates, as well as fifty Chinese Visiting Research Scholars and Graduate Students and 40 Foreign Language Teaching Assistants each year.  Beginning in the fall of 2004, the number of Chinese Fulbright grants doubled per the agreement between the Chinese Ministry of Education and the U.S. State Department to expand the China-U.S. Fulbright Program and share in the cost of funding individual Chinese Fulbright grants.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Program provides for exchanges for doctoral research and U.S. faculty development in Chinese studies.