Artificial Intelligence and the Reconfiguration of China–United States International Education Exchange: A Thematic Review with Bibliometric Visualization

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is reshaping higher education by altering how universities teach, research, evaluate, and collaborate across borders. Nowhere is this transformation more consequential than in the China-United States relationship, which remains central to global science even as geopolitical tension, technology controls, and risk-sensitive regulation complicate bilateral engagement. This paper examines how AI is influencing the coordinated development of China-U.S. international education exchange. The argument is that AI does not simply add a new technical layer to existing cooperation. Instead, it reorganizes the channels through which exchange occurs, expanding digital academic infrastructure, lowering certain transaction costs of collaboration, and raising the strategic importance of data governance, research security, and institutional trust. Methodologically, the study combines conceptual analysis with a structured thematic review of the relevant literature, supported by bibliometric visualization of the corpus. The analysis reveals that bilateral research collaboration intensity peaked around 2019 and has since contracted unevenly under policy pressures including the China Initiative and export controls, with sharp declines in strategic technology fields and relative resilience in biomedicine and earth sciences, suggesting that governance arrangements are becoming a precondition for sustained exchange rather than a by-product of it. The analysis shows that future China-U.S. exchange is likely to become more hybrid, more platform-mediated, and more dependent on governance arrangements than in the era when physical mobility alone dominated. The paper concludes that sustainable cooperation will depend on four sequentially dependent conditions: interoperable digital infrastructure as a foundation, transparent data and ethics protocols, incrementally rebuilt institutional trust, and multilateral formats that serve as a resilience mechanism against the fragility of purely bilateral arrangements.