Photograph by Nicolas Killian
While specters of the terrorist attacks in Jakarta, Paris, and San Bernardino cast a shadow over international diplomacy, and nations in Europe and around the world struggle to cope with a migration of people unprecedented since the Second World War, subscribing to a pessimistic view of the future, one marked by suspicion, isolationism, and a movement away from "ever closer unions," becomes easier.
However, my experiences living and studying in China for a year have given me great hope. In 2015, more than 300,000 Chinese students traveled to the United States to study, often living with American host families, and a much smaller but increasing number of American students spent time in China. Programs such as the State Department's Critical Language Scholarship, the Erasmus network in Europe, and the new Schwarzman Scholarship, among many others, seek to increase communication and interaction between young people from around the world. At a time when terrorism is straining an open and peaceful society, these international exchange programs represent a compelling way to defend against a future of global misunderstanding and conflict.
In his 1875 novel Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." Never has this reality been more important. Ongoing terrorist attacks threaten to turn public opinion against the millions of immigrants fleeing violence and persecution in the Middle East, a predictable but tragic response that might ultimately impede integration and lead to more suffering in the future. Were this to happen, the agents of terrorism around the globe could claim success. Instead, international exchange programs work every day to create citizens less prone to reactionary, xenophobic responses, who will instead grow up to be compassionate leaders of the 21st century.
My research in China's dynamic healthcare sector has given me a view of the country and its citizens that would not have been possible without actually living here; a view that acts as a counterbalance to reports of high-level geopolitical conflicts between our two countries. Professor Li Lanjuan, the director of Hangzhou's State Laboratory for Infectious Disease, has spent her entire career combatting epidemics in China. Thirteen years ago, she was instrumental in stemming the spread of SARS and, more recently, of H7N9 avian influenza. Her expertise has saved many lives in China, and her counsel would certainly be welcomed in other nations around the world, whether they are struggling with Ebola, MERS, or Zika virus. At a time when news from the Far East is mostly concerned with disputed islands, terrorism, and missile tests, there are many areas of collaboration which go unnoticed, but shouldn't.
Under the guidance of Dr. Li and others like her, China has become a global leader in epidemic disease response. One of my goals while here is to synthesize the expertise of these innovative physicians and policy-makers so that it can be disseminated to nations around the world, especially to those with more inchoate disease response systems. Even more importantly, though, I hope to use medicine as a forum for dynamic and positive cooperation between China and the rest of the world. Similarly, other exchange students use their own research to create thousands of new international collaborations around the world.
It is not only research projects that yield such cooperation and understanding. Being immersed in a foreign culture inevitably leads to personal, organic interactions that foster a more profound respect for different cultures, and often create lasting friendships in the process. Two summers ago, I met a man called He Da-ge when he was a fruit vendor at Xiamen University. When he wasn't slicing mangoes or cracking open lychee fruit in the back of his small shop, He Dage read the news. That summer we spent hours debating current events, and as the weeks passed my Chinese rapidly improved. Despite our oft-conflicting opinions, He Dage and I became close friends. "Da-ge" means "big brother" in Mandarin, and to me, He Dage is part big brother, part teacher, and friend. Now, we call each other every week to stay in touch.
During the National Holiday last October, a fellow exchange student and I travelled to the Chinese province of Sichuan and spent a week living with Tibetan monks in the lower Himalaya. While there, eating vegetable soup with a stout old lama, we heard of the brutal suppression of monastic culture during the Cultural Revolution, and the subsequent remarkable successes, since 1980, in reestablishing these monastic traditions of education. In Hangzhou I've befriended two Yemeni students who are studying engineering, and for the first time I listened to stories of the civil war in that nation from somebody who calls it home. Such immersive experiences are not the exception. All over the world, other international students create similar friendships. Whether or not we, the travelers, ultimately pursue careers in diplomacy, we will nevertheless carry a more compassionate and global perspective to whatever vocation we choose.
During Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the United States in September, President Obama reaffirmed America's commitment to support exchange programs in China and all regions of the world, at the same time as the Schwarzman Scholarship was recruiting its first cohort of students to participate in a flagship exchange program in Beijing and Erasmus Scholars were taking up residence across Europe. These are admirable efforts, but governments and institutions around the world must do even more to create opportunities for students to live and study abroad.
As the lovely street-side cafés of Jakarta and the stages and stadiums of Paris again open their doors to the world, thoughts will turn to what a future defined by these tragedies might look like. Let us work to ensure that it is a future expressed by global empathy, compassion, and understanding, and not by increasing distrust and conflict. Agents of global terror act with the conviction that base human emotions of fear and anger can overcome a compassionate worldview. International exchange programs represent a remarkable tool in proving these agents wrong.