According to the Trump administration, Chinese students "exploit" American universities.
Beijing wants bright Chinese who are studying abroad to come home. However, do Chinese students in the US actually pose a threat to national security?
As the Trump administration's hardening national security stance and "America First" doctrine become more and more incompatible with the 277,000 Chinese students on American campuses, a State Department pledge to revoke a record number of Chinese student visas has rocked American higher education and reignited debate over whether the nation can remain a top international academic destination.
The United States will "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in important subjects," according to a brief statement released by Secretary of State Marco Rubio late Wednesday.
Additionally, for those from China and Hong Kong, it will "revise visa standards to intensify scrutiny of all future visa applications." Rubio stated that the State Department will collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security to complete the action.
Beijing has pushed for the return of highly skilled students to China in recent decades in an effort to use international knowledge for its own advancement, particularly in the domains of artificial intelligence, cyber, and defense.
However, the extensive reach of that endeavor runs the risk of raising questions about a much larger group of students who are essential to finance and research at many prestigious American universities.
The United States "will not tolerate the [Chinese Communist Party's] exploitation of U.S. universities or theft of U.S. research intellectual property or technologies to grow its military power, conduct intelligence collection, or repress voices of opposition," according to a statement released Thursday by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.
"We do not share details about what our techniques are about visas," she responded when asked how the revocations may actually operate in practice.
The action is taken as Washington and Beijing's tenuous truce appears to be breaking down. President Donald Trump said Friday that China had "completely broken" a 90-day deal in May that temporarily lowered U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from a high of 145 percent to 30 percent.
Rubio claims that some 300 visas, including some student and guest visas, had been revoked as part of the State Department's increased action against demonstrators on college campuses.
Harvard University has been singled out by the administration; on May 22, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem directed her department to prevent the university from accepting overseas students. Noem accused Harvard of collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party by housing and educating members of its paramilitary outfit and of permitting “anti-American, pro-terrorist” foreigners.
A Massachusetts judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's action after Harvard launched a legal challenge to the ban on overseas students. Over 25% of Harvard's student body is international, with Chinese students making up the highest percentage.
Visa revocations do not always result in instant removal, but they prevent people from returning to the United States if they depart, unlike in several well-known incidents where students have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and placed in deportation proceedings.
The State Department's action was denounced as "politically driven and discriminatory" by Beijing's embassy in Washington. As visa uncertainty increases, Chinese social media has erupted in a nervous debate about whether students should keep applying to U.S. universities.
Erin, a 20-year-old Shanghai native who intended to enroll at Harvard this fall, stated, "I think there is a legitimate issue about whether the U.S. border rules are solid enough." Citing her continuing visa application, she refused to provide her entire name.
She added that many new Harvard students are in a panic and are hoping the problem is resolved before the semester starts via a group conversation. Some have already left and are looking into alternatives in the UK. "The issue at hand is that nobody can predict what will occur."
Senior Trump supporters, including Vice President JD Vance, have also mentioned a wish to reduce competition for American students, despite the State Department and Rubio framing the visa revocations as a national security issue.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller further suggested that the policy's reasons extended beyond national security considerations at a meeting with reporters on Friday. According to him, the policy change also aimed to elevate "American genius" by devaluing international students in comparison to their American counterparts.
Miller stated, "We cannot have a policy in America where every person of this country, whether they are looking for a job, housing, or government assistance in times of need, has to compete with all of planet Earth."
According to analysts, one of the main reasons for the student visa revocations is probably the growing trade and technological divide with Beijing. Jake Werner, head of the China program at the Quincy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, said, "I would interpret it as a sign of a more extensive poisonous relationship." "Not all Chinese people are spies, even if every big nation has spies."
China has increased its attempts to entice domestic students and intellectuals who are educated overseas throughout the last 20 years. These returnees are valued as essential resources in Beijing's quest for economic and technological supremacy and are referred to as haigui, or "sea turtles."
Building databases of highly valued Chinese talent overseas and organizing targeted recruiting drives with housing and compensation incentives are just two of the billions of dollars Beijing and provincial governments have spent to get Chinese talent from overseas to return home. Talent-focused industrial zones have emerged all around China, such as the "Overseas Chinese Student Pioneer Park" and the "European Semiconductor Returnee Talent Entrepreneurship Park."
The Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), which was introduced in 2008 to provide financial incentives to outstanding academic, scientific, and entrepreneurial talent, mostly from abroad Chinese, is arguably the most contentious of these programs. Officially not a national security initiative, it has become a point of contention for U.S. senators who claim Beijing has been able to divert U.S.-funded research because of it.
Prosecutors have accused beneficiaries of fraud and tax charges for breaking grant regulations and failing to declare their affiliations with Chinese programs while also collecting U.S. research support, even though accepting funds from the TTP is not necessarily prohibited.
Song Guo Zheng, a rheumatologist at Ohio State University, entered a guilty plea in 2020 to lying on grant applications from the National Institutes of Health by not disclosing his Thousand Talents Plan link. He received a 37-month prison sentence. In a separate case, Xiao-Jiang Li, a neurology professor at Emory University, was found guilty of submitting a false tax return because he neglected to disclose his participation in the study.
The burden that increasing U.S. vetting places on resources is one of the difficulties. During his first term in 2020, Trump enacted regulations that prohibited Chinese students from attending or receiving financial aid from colleges associated with Beijing's "civil-military fusion" plan, which is China's attempt to combine military growth and private-sector innovation.
It is extremely difficult to screen hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, and snap decisions based on party or university connections frequently miss the complexity of individual backgrounds.
It is challenging to evaluate individual risk because of the ambiguous and frequently broad definition of civil-military linkages as well as the hazy relationships between universities and the government. Political status is also difficult to interpret: almost 100 million people are members of the Communist Party, frequently as a means of advancing their careers rather than as an indication of their intellectual commitment. Hundreds of millions more are connected to the party through family or work.
Consequently, the regulations are implemented in an opaque and, in certain cases, indiscriminate manner. Many claim they have no affiliation with the Chinese military or its related institutions, and other students, even long-term residents of the United States, have been refused reentry without explanation.
The director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Tai Ming Cheung, stated, "I think the [new] administration is taking a much more expansive definition." He also stated that he has not yet seen a clear definition of how the administration plans to identify students in "critical fields" or with "connections to the Chinese Communist Party."
The Atlantic Council's Global China Hub associate director, Kitsch Liao, highlighted the wider risk of Chinese students studying critical fields like aerospace as well as the more specific but more focused issue of espionage.
He claimed that, like many other nations, China uses students to help with IP theft and other espionage and influence operations.
Liao referred to the broad visa limitations imposed by the Trump administration, saying, "The question is whether this is the correct method to tackle this problem." "There are numerous drawbacks if this strategy is implemented poorly."
He mentioned Qian Xuesen, who is considered to be the father of China's ballistic missile program. He was a member of the founding crew of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in China. Amid Cold War Red Scare worries, he was deported back to China in 1955 by the Eisenhower government.
According to Liao, "he returned and assisted them in developing their missile program." "That is not what you want to happen."
Republican pressure, including requests to resurrect the contentious China Initiative, which increased legal scrutiny of Chinese professors during Trump's first term, prompted the U.S. crackdown on Chinese visas. A bill that would specifically prohibit all visas for Chinese citizens wishing to study in the United States was presented by Republican lawmakers in March, though it is unlikely to pass.
Democrats on the usually conservative House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party denounced the action on Friday and called for an evidence-based strategy. "An untargeted, discriminating policy that turns away all Chinese students erodes our principles, fosters a culture of fear, feeds anti-Asian hatred, erodes our institutions, and benefits our enemies, including the Chinese Communist Party itself," the group stated in a statement.
