International students may begin to return from February

Universities and colleges across multiple Chinese provinces will end the semester earlier this year due to COVID-19 flare-ups in the country, with universities in several provinces starting their winter break up to two weeks earlier than usual as part of China’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy for containment.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel for a limited number of international students as students at two Sino-US joint venture universities – Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu province close to Shanghai, and New York University Shanghai – who have been stranded abroad since January 2020, have been told to prepare to return.

Sources at the two universities have indicated however that return is not likely before the Chinese New Year holiday in early February 2022 and possibly not until after the winter Olympics which begin later that month.

Universities in provinces including Henan, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Fujian, Shandong, Shanxi and Hubei have issued notifications to adjust their winter vacations, with some of them notifying students their vacations will start as early as 20 December.

The moves came as the port city of Dalian in northeastern Liaoning province registered several cases of COVID-19 in early November, sparking a lockdown. Dalian’s university town of Zhuanghe is said by officials to be the epicentre of the country’s latest outbreak.

Public transport stopped in Zhuanghe and traffic out of the city was cut off, after it went under “complete lockdown” on 5 November, said Zhuanghe’s acting mayor Sun Gongli.

Some nine rounds of testing have been conducted and thousands of students transferred to centralised quarantine facilities, official media reported. Mayor Sun said this week emergency personnel were in the town “to assist with student management and prevent infections from getting out”.

The university cluster by Monday accounted for over 70 cases, officials said, with reports suggesting the outbreak was linked to canteen workers. Around 10,000 students have been quarantined.

At a 13 November press briefing of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Wang Dengfeng, director of the physical, health and arts education department of China’s Ministry of Education, said university and college vacation plans would depend on the epidemic situation and the requirements of the provinces, the official Global Times newspaper reported.

Foreign students at two universities prepare to return

While the Liaoning outbreak does not bode well for the return of international students to most Chinese universities, special dispensation appears to be on the cards for at least two Sino-United States joint universities.

The senior leadership at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in Eastern Jiangsu province on 8 November sent an email to its enrolled international students saying China is now working on a “detailed plan to facilitate international students’ safe entry to the Chinese mainland”. The university recommended that international students begin preparing necessary visa application materials for entry to China and urged students to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

“Early indications suggest that this procedure, once finalised, will allow students to enter gradually in groups over time to ensure suitable and sufficient quarantine measures,” it said. China currently requires foreigners to quarantine for up to four weeks, which DKU students would spend in a combination of hotels and university housing, it added.

There was no date for when students might be able to start applying for visas or when they might be able to enter China, but progress was “encouraging”, the email said. In a separate notification, DKU said a decision would be made by 10 December.

Denis Simon, senior advisor to the president of Duke University in the US and former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, told University World News that around 35% of the students at DKU were international students.

“Our international faculty were allowed permission to go back. So right now on campus, we have Chinese students, international faculty and a few international staff in place. But the students remain scattered around the world.”

Simon was referring to academics and researchers allowed to return after September 2020.

Around 40% of the enrolled international students are from the US; 60% would be from elsewhere. New York University (NYU) Shanghai has around 50% of its student body from overseas.

“The foreign students’ absence is conspicuous by the fact that the nature of the academic environment at DKU does shift and becomes more ‘Chinese’ and less global, so everyone, including the faculties, wants international students to be able to return,” Simon said.

He added that the Chinese authorities also realised “there is some cost” when there are no international students at these types of universities, which particularly impact DKU and NYU Shanghai.

Other Sino-foreign universities such as the University of Nottingham Ningbo and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and others have a much lower percentage of international students “so the impact on student life is less”, he noted.

While decisions about border lockdowns are not made by the Ministry of Education, “the Ministry of Education, which is the biggest endorser of these [Sino-foreign] universities, is anxious to get the students back,” Simon said.

Simon added that bringing back international students to DKU was also symbolically important as the very first DKU class which entered in 2018 was due to graduate in May-June 2022, and will have spent more of their undergraduate years away from Kunshan than at the university.

“The February Olympic games is a key demarcation point. The leadership has been hoping that they would not have any serious outbreak. The majority of cases [in China] have come from people returning from abroad. So they [the authorities] have been extra guarded in preparation for the Olympics,” Simon said, pointing to the experience of the Olympics in Japan.

“If the COVID situation were to spiral in the wrong direction, that would pre-empt China’s ability to make it a global event.”

NYU email to students

David Pe, the dean of students at NYU Shanghai, also issued an email to its international students on 1 November, indicating “with a high degree of confidence” that students would be able to take classes in person in Shanghai next semester.

NYU Shanghai, which has around 900 foreign students from 80 countries, is due to officially open its new campus in Shanghai’s Pudong area in early 2022, which the Shanghai authorities are keen to keep on track, according to one source in Shanghai.

Other Chinese universities are unaware of any plans for international students to be allowed into the country. A state department official in the US said on Tuesday that student returns had not been discussed at all between US President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping in an important hours long call between the two leaders this week.

South Korean students were allowed back in August 2020 with no vaccine requirements as part of an intergovernmental deal between Beijing and Seoul, as well as some NYU Shanghai students and students at the Tianjin Juilliard School and Georgia Tech Shenzhen.

Foreign students campaigning to return to China derided the special treatment for a handful of Sino-American joint universities while thousands of other international students were stranded and have had no indication at all of any date for return.

The China International Student Union, which is campaigning for foreign students to return, said this week that scholarship recipients who are not in China claimed they have ceased receiving their monthly stipends.

It said via Twitter last week: “Hope students can receive some communication about it [student returns] from the authorities and safe travel to be facilitated same as other visa holders and US-China joint uni students.”