Since joining the faculty at Georgetown University in Washington in 2016, I have been deeply involved in academic exchanges between the United States and China at the university level. Georgetown's connection with China dates back to 1885 when the then US president Grover Cleveland appointed Georgetown alumnus Charles Denby as the US minister to China.

Denby once remarked, "There is no country in the world more underrated than China."

Over the years, Georgetown has proudly welcomed thousands of Chinese students, including Wang Yi, the current director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, who spent time as a visiting scholar at the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

As the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the US, Georgetown draws inspiration from the legacy of the great Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. Ricci mastered the Chinese language and became the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601.

He was invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calendrical science.

One of my favorite ways to introduce Chinese and US students to each other is by asking them how their lives are different from their grandparents'.

Chinese students often recount the vast changes their parents experienced during the reform and opening-up period.

They describe a transition from a more traditional, resource-constrained lifestyle to the modern conveniences of today. Many families had no running water and the only machines they typically had were bicycles and sewing machines.

US students remember that their grandparents had only black-and-white televisions with three channels — ABC, NBC and CBS. Many grandparents had vivid memories of the Vietnam War, with some being veterans of that conflict.

Through these reflections, students can gain a deeper understanding of how different their family heritages are and why they have different perspectives on various issues.

I also ask students what they share in common today.

Not surprisingly, since most of them never let their phones out of their hands, both Chinese and US students emphasize the centrality of social media in their lives.

Living in cyberspace, this generation is not just aware of the trends in their own country, but also of global youth culture.

Indeed, my students, while still citizens of their home countries, are also distinctly a generation of global citizens. They are eager to make a better world and are impatient with the failures of past generations to deal with problems such as climate change and food insecurity in the Global South.

From personal experience, I know that interactions between Chinese and US students can be life-altering.

In 1975, US students could not study in China, so I did the second-best thing.

I applied for the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From the rooftop of my dorm in the New Territories in Hong Kong, I could see the Chinese mainland, which I vowed to visit someday.

As a member of the university swimming team, I bonded with a teammate from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province.

We would spend hours comparing our family histories and hoping that the opening that Chairman Mao Zedong and the then US president Richard Nixon had initiated would flourish.

I never imagined that a few years later, on a cold January morning in 1979, I would stand on the White House lawn as a student representative to witness the ceremonial welcome accorded to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping by the then US president Jimmy Carter.

Today, I regret that fewer Chinese and US students have the same opportunities to expand their mindsets. The number of US students studying in China and the number of Chinese students studying in the US are both declining.

Although we can initiate virtual dialogues to keep the interaction going, they are not substitutes for the kind of experience that comes only with immersive programs of language and cultural study.

Hopefully the US and Chinese leaders can open the doors wider for academic exchanges to flourish once again, enabling the shared benefit of all humanity.

The author is a senior fellow in the Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University. He previously served as the National Security Council's director for China.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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