We held our own Gen-Z version of the US-China summit.
The week before this conversation was recorded, my guest, a 老外 (laowai) sat for an interview with a major Chinese outlet for a piece on US-China youth exchange. He told the reporter what he actually thinks about why American students hesitate to come to China — academic freedom, reciprocal field access, wrongful detention risk, broader uncertainty. None of it survived into print. What survived was hotel rules, payment apps, and the language barrier. He posted about it on WeChat Moments. That post is what got us onto the call.
Blake Kravitz has been studying Chinese since he was twelve. He grew up in Florida, took middle school Mandarin from a Chongqing teacher who gave him his first Chinese name, did six different programs in China across nearly a decade, studied at Penn and Wharton, worked at think tanks in Washington, and is now finishing his first year of a two-year master’s at Yenching Academy at Peking University. He just helped run Yenching Global Symposium 2026. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of American the field used to produce in much larger numbers and now barely produces at all.
This conversation is about what that pipeline actually looks like from inside it in 2026 — what Yenching teaches, what gets said in the seminar room versus the lunch table, what changes when you leave Beijing for Rongjiang or Qinghai, how Chinese classmates ask about Taiwan and Xinjiang over canteen meals, and what an American at this particular moment carries into and out of those conversations.
What we covered:
– The interview that got cut, and what was actually in his original conversation with the reporter
– Twelve years of Chinese language study, starting in middle school in Florida, and what changed about coming to China across six programs
– Why Yenching Academy specifically, and how the two-year structure with a fieldwork second year differs from Schwarzman, Hopkins-Nanjing, and Duke Kunshan
– What the seminar room is like with no cameras in it, and the professor who opened class by telling foreign students to challenge him on anything
– The “Yenching bubble inside the PKU bubble inside the Beijing bubble,” and what fieldwork in Guizhou and Qinghai looked like
– Being identifiably American outside the tier-one cities, the requests for photos, and the work of being an informal cultural ambassador
– Chinamaxxing and the “America kill line” (斩杀线): two mirror memes about each country running through the other’s social media in 2026
– The structural collapse of the American study-in-China pipeline, the US-China Education Trust’s recent report, and the policy case for restoring it
– Whether the next generation of analysts on both sides will inherit a relationship better or worse than this one
A few moments worth listening for:
Blake on the article that left out the deeper reasons: “What ended up being mentioned most was things like hotels not accepting foreigners, downloading Alipay and WeChat Pay. But I don’t think those are actually what’s preventing American students from coming to China in the first place.”
On the Yenching classroom: “The Yenching Academy mentions to students, and to teachers, that there’s no cameras in the classroom.”
On layered bubbles: “Yenching is a bubble inside Peking University, which is a bubble inside Beijing, which is a bubble inside China. There’s a lot of layers to getting out.”
On the optimist’s answer: “As long as there’s still Americans coming to China, the people that are eventually forming US policy towards China will be informed. I gave you the optimistic answer.”
Companion reading:
“The Quest for Knowing New China Hands” — the essay this episode runs alongside, on Beijing’s pathology of reading Washington as a list of named brokers.
中美关系的潜力、张力、角力｜中美青年需要比“小红书对账”更宽广的天地- the interview piece we mentioned at the start.
Resource Hub for U.S. Academic Travel to China by The US–China Education Trust
If you have made a similar trip, in either direction across the Pacific, write to me with your version of the questions this episode keeps circling.
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— Yaqi
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