The United States is dismantling university-based programs for Southeast Asian studies, while China is elevating them as a state-backed academic field. This divergence highlights differing values placed on regional knowledge and its potential impact on understanding the complex region.
The US's reduction in Southeast Asian studies expertise could hinder its ability to understand and effectively engage with the region's complexities, potentially ceding influence to China, which is actively investing in such knowledge.
The United States and China are diverging in their approaches to cultivating expertise on Southeast Asia, a region both consider indispensable. While the US is dismantling university-based programs that train specialists in Southeast Asian languages, history, and politics, China is elevating these area studies into a top-tier, state-backed academic field.
The US model, historically reliant on federal funding through Title VI National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, is facing an abrupt dismantling. The termination of this federal funding in 2025 has pushed the US knowledge ecosystem to the brink. This has immediate consequences, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill closing all six of its area studies centers, including the Carolina Asia Center. The University of Washington has had to seek emergency funding to prevent its Khmer language program, one of only seven in the US, from disappearing.
This erosion of expertise is seen as narrowing the future pool of Americans capable of studying Southeast Asia in its own languages and on its own terms. Regional expertise, often beginning with knowledge not easily reduced to policy relevance like literature, local newspapers, and oral histories, is sustained by universities.
Conversely, China is taking a different path. Country and regional studies became a first-level graduate discipline in 2022 and were added to China’s undergraduate major catalog last year. Official narratives, including speeches by President Xi Jinping, emphasize comprehensive, interdisciplinary, practical, and timely research on the politics, economy, and culture of different countries and regions. This expansion reflects China's proximity and geopolitical involvement in Southeast Asia through trade, infrastructure, and diplomacy, alongside territorial disputes.