THE INSTITUTE

The Pacific Exchange is an independent research network and alumni community founded in 2019 to study, document, and support educational exchange between the United States and the People's Republic of China. We are not affiliated with any single university. We are not a degree-granting institution. We are a small, fiercely independent group of researchers, former exchange students, language instructors, and program administrators who think the question of how Americans and Chinese citizens learn from one another is still worth taking seriously.

OUR MISSION

We publish long-form essays, working papers, and quiet research on the state of US-China educational exchange. We track student flows in both directions. We interview returning study-abroad cohorts. We map the alumni networks that hold together long after the visas expire. The premise is simple — when fewer than 800 American students are studying in mainland China in a given year, somebody should be paying attention.

HOW WE WORK

The institute keeps a deliberately small staff. We commission essays from former Fulbright fellows, Yenching scholars, Schwarzman alumni, language-program teachers, and the kind of mid-career researcher who has spent a decade flying between Boston and Beijing. Our work is editorially independent. We accept no money from foreign governments and we do not endorse any individual program. We publish what we find.

FOUNDING

The Pacific Exchange was founded in the autumn of 2019 by a group of former exchange students and language-program coordinators who wanted a public-facing record of an exchange relationship that had been shrinking for several years before the pandemic and continued to contract during it. We launched the public essay series in 2021. We accept submissions from researchers, students, and program staff on a rolling basis. We are based neither in Cambridge nor in Beijing, deliberately — the institute operates as a distributed network with no campus address.