mtbssd

Columbia rejections are out on the application management website, where you sent in the app

Hey there,
 
I can claim the Georgetown acceptance! I'm an IR  person. Sorry forgot to put the subfield in when I submitted. Still pretty shocked right now 
 
Apparently they made decisions Friday and are slowly but surely calling people so definitely don't lost hope!

If you want to learn Chinese and experience real Chinese culture, go to Taiwan.
People are nice (the girls there are really beautiful), the environment is clean, no censorship and cheaper than places like Beijing or Shanghai.
For an exchange or a language course, I would say that's a great choice ! much better than than Mainland; of course you want to go there too, but just for holiday..

China University sucks. Never, never think about going there, because literally, without offence, Chinese universities desecrate what is calling "Political Science".
 
HK and Taiwan, or even Japan and Singapore are good options, and they are not that hard to apply.

I was going to come here and make this point. While this isn't the case for everyone (there is that occasional star that probably can get a US-job with a PhD from Asia) it does make it harder for you to market yourself in the US (and I assume Europe).
 
Studying in Europe or the US, learning methods and how the discipline works, coupled with extensive field research in Asia might be a better option.

Where do you want to end up? In academia? From what I understand, for academia, doing your PhD in Asia is very difficult (i.e. getting your PhD from an Asian institution). As someone working on Asia myself, I did consider doing a PhD in Asia, but it seemed like if anything, NUS in Singapore is the only school where you have a realistic chance for getting an academic job outside of Asia, and even they have mostly US-educated peeps on their faculty.
 
Did you look into joint programs/the possibility of doing research years in China/India? I met a guy from GWU while in China, and know of at least one program in Germany that explicitly has 1 year Germany, 1 year China, co-supervision.
 
I also believe that doing a PhD at a Chinese university is even more difficult than at an Indian uni, bc of censorship, which is real. An acquaintance of mine had to write two M.A. thesis, because the first one did not pass the censorship. For India-China, where Tibet is likely to play a role, that could be a real concern. Even if it isn't a concern for your research, it'll likely be a concern for people seeing your diploma. Fudan is amazing for IR, but (1) censorship happens even there, and (2) most of my friends doing English-language programs were quite disappointed with them, since the quality of education/supervision etc. was not what they expected.