It seemed like a great solution to a bad problem.

Plagued by years of cuts in state funding, UC San Diego threw open its doors to Chinese students who were willing to pay three times as much tuition as California residents to attend the prestigious La Jolla school.

The money helped it hire faculty, add courses, stock the library and cover financial aid for Californians. The students also have bolstered research into everything from self-driving cars to cancer treatments.

By fall 2018, the University of California San Diego had 5,573 Chinese students, the most of any UC campus.


But the strategy may be unraveling. Chinese enrollment grew by only 41 this fall after soaring by an average of 526 students a year over the past decade. Enrollment could drop in 2020.

The social and political climate in the U.S. has left many foreign students feeling unwelcome and unsafe, leading to a national drop in the number of newcomers seeking a spot at American universities, according the Institute of International Education, a New York-based interest group.

Students have described the climate as anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, especially against the Chinese, who account for a third of the roughly 1 million international students in the U.S.

Educators say much of the tension stems from the U.S.-China trade war, which led the Trump administration to consider banning Chinese students from U.S. schools.


The idea was shelved. But the administration tightened visa restrictions on Chinese graduate students in certain areas of science and technology.

The move caused a shudder at UC San Diego, which heavily uses the students in research that benefits companies like San Diego-based Qualcomm, the nation’s largest chipmaker, and Northrop Grumman, the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor.

Students also are upset that the Trump administration has regularly and publicly said that Chinese scholars and students might steal intellectual property or act as spies on American campuses.


“Chinese students are just purely students,” said Pengcheng Cao, a graduate student in engineering. “They are not different from young people in the U.S.”

The collective uproar is having an impact. The university said last week that it is beginning to focus less on China and more on recruiting high-paying undergraduates from other parts of the world and the U.S. No quotas have been set for these students, who are charged $30,000 more than Californians in annual undergraduate tuition.

Chancellor Pradeep Khosla signaled the change in October, telling the Union-Tribune that perhaps the time had come to recruit more aggressively from other parts of the world. But he didn’t find the situation worrisome.

“We are not losing sleep over Chinese students not coming here. ... The rest of the world is open to us and people care about what we do and know what a great institution we are,” he said.


Even so, UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management started has been diversifying its student mix.

“We are certainly aware that we are one tweet away from having a significant decrease in the volume of applications from China, and we are working on ways to manage that risk,” said Sean Carver, assistant dean of graduate programs at Rady.

He was referring to Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who angered the Chinese on Oct. 4 when he posted a Twitter message that said, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

UC San Diego’s revised strategy involves challenge and risk, especially when it comes to diversifying its foreign enrollment. The campus doesn’t have a history of making such change.

The university draws students from more than 90 countries. Only five of them sent more than 100 students last fall; only one — China — sent more than 1,000.


UC San Diego’s overall enrollment has soared by 12,113 since 2008. Nearly 44 percent of those students were from China.

There’s just as much concern about how a decline in Chinese students could affect UC San Diego’s research program, which averages almost $4 million a day in new funding.

“The work they’re doing is critical for the scientific progress being made in our labs,” said Susan Shirk, chair of UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center.

“You might say there are no substitutes because American primary and secondary education are not producing sufficient science and technology manpower for America,” she said.


East meets West

UC San Diego talks about its riches so often some may wonder why it needs to recruit out-of-state and foreign students who pay a premium to attend.

The campus pulled in $1.4 billion last year for research, which is nearly 15 times higher than the San Diego Padres’ opening day payroll in 2019.

The school also raised $2 billion in donations over the past seven years, setting a record.


But over the last two decades, the percentage of revenue that UC campuses receive from the state fell to 6 percent from 25 percent. The crunch was made worse by the Great Recession.

Like other UC campuses, UC San Diego turned its attention to China, where there was pent-up demand among students who want to study abroad, especially the U.S.

China has experienced extraordinary economic growth since the late 1970s, creating a large middle class with disposable income. Most families have only one child and they cherish higher education.


“If it is within a family’s means, or even if it is borderline, they will squeeze their expenses to pay for their child’s education,” said Kun Zhang, who emigrated from China and is now chair of UC San Diego’s highly ranked bioengineering department.

“This kind of thinking represents 2,000 years of Confucian culture.”

The Chinese were looking to California at the same time Californians were looking to them.

There is deep frustration in China over the gaokao, the national college entrance exam. It’s so grueling that many cities ask people to be quiet near schools to avoid distracting test takers. If a student performs poorly, they have virtually no chance of getting into one of China’s comparatively few elite universities. There’s far more demand than supply.


Many students ignore the gaokao and apply directly to the University of California system, where one application is easily distributed to multiple campuses.

“California! Hollywood! Palm trees! Great weather! It’s so glamorous to Chinese students,” said Teru Clavel, author of the recently released book, “World Class: One Mother’s Journey Halfway Around the Globe in Search of the Best Education for Her Children.”

Chinese students also know that “earning a degree at a UC campus and learning English means you have a much better chance of getting a good job when you go back to China.”

Educators estimate that about 80 percent of Chinese students return home after studying abroad, and not always for job opportunities or to see family. It is becoming harder to obtain a visa to remain in the U.S. to work.


Trying to fit in

There’s little that happens in China that escapes notice in La Jolla.

UC San Diego has one of the largest, most respected collections of Chinese experts in the U.S. They examine topics such as the intricacies of divorce and the health of the nation’s auto industry.

China’s Fudan University operates a research group at UC San Diego that serves the UC system. And the campus hosts visiting scholars from companies like Tencent, one of China’s tech giants.


Research is published widely and often featured in public talks.

But the openness is not universal.

The Union-Tribune approached six Chinese students, only one of whom would speak on the record and in detail. Two of the students asked if they could use single-word pseudonyms. A prominent Chinese geneticist also declined to talk.

A professor who said that he would allow the Union-Tribune to photograph Chinese students at his engineering laboratory work changed his mind.


The most common denominator: Anxiety about saying or doing something that would antagonize the U.S., China — or both.

It’s happened before. The Chinese government temporarily stopping providing some of its students with scholarships to attend UC San Diego after the university booked the Dalai Lama as its commencement speaker in 2017.

Faculty say the anxiety reflects life in modern China, where many universities pay so-called student information officers to monitor whether their professors criticize Chinese President Xi Jinping or the Communist Party.

Dissent is quashed at every level of society.


“All the Internet portals in China including social media applications are required to delete all messages that are not patriotic,” said Victor Shih, a political economist at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.

“The patriotic ones are amplified.”

Poor language skills also can be an isolating factor.

“Some (Chinese students) have a very good command of idiomatic conversational English,” said literature professor Seth Lerer.


“Others have virtually no conversational or academic English. ... I’ve had other students who have admitted they are incapable of reading the texts or following my lectures.”

It’s more of a problem in the humanities than it the sciences. But the sciences have their own issues — including the protection of intellectual property and guarding against spying.

The university decided in August 2018 that it would not accept money or enter into agreements with the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei because the U.S. government suspected the company of spying.

One UC San Diego executive said the move arose from the increased pressure that large research universities have been getting from federal agencies to examine their interactions with China.


The university hastened to add that it wasn’t cutting ties with other Chinese companies, including Huami, a biometric company that last year paid UC San Diego $100,000 to be a member of the corporate affiliate program.

Like other firms, Huami wants an early look at research occurring in the Center for Wearable Sensors, which develops tiny wireless devices that monitor glucose and blood pressure levels.

UC San Diego also has been trying to reassure foreign students that they are welcome.

“Our classes are open to all students. There are no ‘secret labs’ in engineering,” said Al Pisano, dean of UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.


“We fully subscribe to the campus and system-wide ideals of the ‘open research university.’ Staying with this philosophy will help us win the technology race in the long run.”