One of the Chinese delegates to the Sino-American summit was chastising his American counterpart: “Why do you stand by Taiwan when it has betrayed your trust? How can you say Taiwan is your friend?” The American delegate tugged at his tie and tried to suppress a smile. “Well,” he said, “it’s like having a wife. You have to put up with a lot of stuff in a relationship.”

At that, the other 30 delegates in the room scrapped all attempts at decorum and whooped for their favorite new riposte. Presidents Hu Jintao and George W. Bush slapped each other on the back and agreed to continue the debate at that evening’s karaoke contest.

Okay, it was only a simulated summit. But the Chinese and American college students who gathered on campus last spring for the second annual Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES) really were into their roles, and their discussions of missile defense systems, trade issues and North Korea had the feel of real deals in the making.

Funded by the University president’s office and other campus sponsors, the weeklong conference brought together 16 Chinese college students and 16 American undergraduates chosen from hundreds of applicants nationwide. As the teams got down to debating the nitty-gritty details of the Taiwan question and nonproliferation, they had to switch sides—with Chinese students arguing for U.S. positions, and American students becoming Chinese policy makers. When they reconvened in Beijing in August, the teams continued their role reversals at the negotiating tables.

“Simulation turns out to be a great process because students learn so much by being the actors,” says FACES president Zachary Levine, a 2004 graduate in political science who took over the exchange program after its founding by fellow poli sci student Jessica Chen Weiss, ’03.

Before leaving their campuses, the delegates read materials posted online and wrote policy memos. And once they arrived on the Farm? “We spent 18 hours a day together,” says Tian Kai, a freshman from Peking University who served as an American delegate on the regional security working group.

Between the would-be diplomats’ 30-minute discussions, they e-mailed real-life experts who were sitting at their computers, ready to respond to sticky issues, in the U.S. State Department and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

“We wanted professors and government officials to be able to monitor their positions, and we set up times for them to be available to receive and respond to e-mail questions,” Levine says. “The students get a lot more out of [the negotiations] if they’re forced to be realistic and not just reach compromises that are implausible.”