The Emergence of China-U.S. Giving in the Twenty-First Century: The Role of Elite Training Programs

Abstract

The phenomenon of U.S. nonprofit organizations contracting with and receiving gifts from organizations abroad has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. In the United States, policy makers, journalists, and scholars have framed U.S. universities’ foreign gifts and contracts, particularly from China, in a way that conflates all dollars received with the nation-state of origin and malign foreign influence operations. This study introduces the concept of philanthropic inflows through multiple analyses to discern outcomes of Mainland Chinese organizations’ reported funding to U.S. universities between 1986 and 2019. It compares government, industry, and higher education data with funders and recipients and examines over one thousand documents. It finds that public universities were more likely to have reported international engagements as contracts, while some private universities reported funding for the same types of activities as gifts. The study makes a testable proposition that organizations receive cross-border gifts according to their own logics. Additionally, the study covers three phases of China-U.S. engagement, beginning with China’s Reform and Opening Up in the late 1970s, when U.S. economists advised Chinese leaders on the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented one. In the early 1990s, U.S. universities received federal grants through a program designed to help former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe privatize. The universities used the U.S. government grants to develop training programs and new business degrees for those international clients, and later drew on those experiences to expand their offerings into Asia, creating Executive MBAs in partnership with Chinese universities. Beginning in the early 2000s, Chinese banks contracted with U.S. business schools for short-term executive training programs as they prepared to join the global economy, and the business schools continued to develop customized programs for executives in new industries as they emerged in China. Finally, after 2010, the wealth generated by China’s economic growth allowed Chinese high-net-worth individuals to begin making major philanthropic gifts to U.S. universities and to contract with universities for jointly developed programming as they explored new ways to leverage their wealth to create social good in China and around the world.