I went to a rural high school where 20% of the “senior” class every year was Chinese exchange students, a large portion of them continued to study in the US for their post-secondary education, exactly 1 of all the people I spoke to has a parent who is even an active member within the party and he is a mid level bureaucrat in a no-name city. It’s not nearly as common as you seem to believe. Many people go into debt to study in America, with their family’s homes used as collateral (which was the case for multiple students I met in college from India).