The greatest takeaway for a 12-member delegation of students and faculty members from Harvard, who were visiting China from May 17 to Monday, was not banquet or handshake. It was something more down-to-earth: US students wandering through Chinese?university?campuses, mixing with their peers until late into the evening.

At a time when the imperative to stabilize Sino-US relations has become?urgent, such encounters stand in stark contrast to the image of China peddled by hawks in Washington.

The ups and downs of Sino-US relations over the past years have produced such a?condition: two?large nations deeply entangled economically, yet increasingly unfamiliar with one another at the human level, as many US people?are increasingly subjected to distorted portrayals of China, filtered through algorithmic outrage and political theater.

That is why student exchanges matter far beyond the university setting. The delegation’s visit to Beijing, Shenzhen and Guiyang, soon after the first visit by a US leader to China in nine years, reflects the two sides’ shared commitment to deepening youth exchanges to help stabilize the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.

For decades after the founding?of Sino-US?diplomatic?relations in 1979, educational and cultural exchanges functioned as a stabilizing ballast in ties. Even during some difficult times, scholars, students and researchers continued crossing the Pacific, creating reservoirs of familiarity that restrained the worst impulses of ideological hostility.

The US people?who studied in Shanghai or Beijing returned home with a more textured understanding of Chinese society. Chinese students living in Boston or California discovered a US more complicated than Hollywood’s portrayals. That infrastructure of understanding should not be eroded, least of all dismantled.

Yet research institutions in the US have warned of a sharp decline in US graduate students conducting research in China, as funding for China studies has dried up?in the US. Politicized “security anxieties”?increasingly shape academic collaborations. Difficulties in procuring visas and political suspicion have led to what some scholars call the “securitization of scholarship” — a climate in which intellectual engagement itself is increasingly being viewed through the prism of zero-sum game.

History suggests this is a profound mistake: proximity humanizes; distance radicalizes. This is particularly true of the young people in both countries, who are inheriting a relationship increasingly defined by competition rather than cooperation. If the perceptions US youths have of China are formed exclusively through social media clips and ill-advised political rhetoric, then the future of Sino-US relations will risk resting?on mutual paranoia.

No bilateral relationship can remain stable if their peoples stop trying to understand each other. The Harvard delegation’s experiences in China do not erase political differences, they show they are manageable. It is competition without understanding that leads countries into rivalry.

Mutual trust is built not only through diplomacy and military hotlines. It is more fundamentally accumulated gradually through numerous mundane human interactions in classrooms, research collaborations, cultural and sports?programs, friendships and shared experiences.

These connections forge something that diplomats cannot manufacture during crises: a willingness to see the other side not as enemies, but as human beings.

The torch of China-US friendship should be passed on to the youth. If the younger generation of the?US and?China?stop meeting one another, stop studying together, stop debating face-to-face and stop experiencing each other’s societies directly, then the relationship will increasingly be defined by estrangement.

And estrangement, unlike friendship, is remarkably easy to inherit.