Chinese students reconsidering the US as Republicans threaten their visas
AUSTIN, Texas – Over lunch at the University of Texas at Austin, a professor from China and two Chinese students spoke dispiritedly this past week of the directive issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to 'aggressively revoke' visas of Chinese nationals studying in 'critical fields'. They also talked about a Republican bill in Congress that would ban Chinese student visas to the United States.
Even if such matters never come to pass, said Xiaobo Lu, a professor of government at the university in Austin, 'the damage is already being done'.
'Chinese students are practical,' he said. 'They now have to consider whether, if they come to America, their studies will be disrupted. There's no removing that uncertainty. That ship has sailed.'
The two students accompanying Prof Lu to lunch, who asked not to be named for fear that their visa status might be at risk, described several recent conversations with Chinese friends. One had decided to turn down offers at two prestigious American journalism schools and had opted instead for the programme at the University of Hong Kong. Another said no to a coveted slot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in favour of a modest local government job.
A third Chinese friend, currently studying at Johns Hopkins University, is mulling whether to pack his bags and finish his degree back home.
Their accounts align with sentiments shared by a senior academic official at the University of Texas, who said that several excellent graduate school candidates from China had withdrawn their applications. The official added that a number of Chinese students on the Austin campus were afraid to criticise the measures. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he shared those fears.
There are about 1,400 Chinese students on the Austin campus. A spokesperson for the university said that its administrators would have no comment.
The chilling effect that has overtaken some Chinese nationals in the United States on student visas comes as the Trump administration and its allies have suggested that their presence constitutes a national security threat. Such assertions, combined with the continuing trade war with China, represent an increasingly strident anti-China sentiment among conservative officials, even as their states wrestle with the benefits and drawbacks of having Chinese students in their colleges and universities.
The bill in Congress, called the Stop CCP Visas Act, was introduced in March by Representative Riley Moore, a freshman Republican from West Virginia who said in an interview that 'we're going to push hard for it'.
Its prospects in the House are uncertain, and it has little chance of passing in the Senate, where it would need Democratic support to achieve a filibuster-proof supermajority. The timing of the legislation is also curious, given that Chinese student enrollment in the United States has fallen by more than 25 per cent, from about 370,000 in 2019 to roughly 277,000 in the 2023-24 academic year, according to data from the Institute of International Education.
Critics say that even if the bill goes nowhere, its message and Mr Rubio's directive will alienate foreign students who are considering the United States.
'Why take the chance to come here when you know that some new policy might disrupt your studies?' said Eddie West, the assistant vice-president for international affairs for California State University, Fresno. 'And you could understand if a family in India is looking at this and saying, 'Are we going to be targeted next?''
Of the Chinese citizens whose visas would be revoked by his bill, Mr Moore was dismissive of the idea that they were here simply studying. 'Maybe some are,' he said. He added that a law passed in 2017 by the Chinese government, the National Intelligence Law, stipulates that citizens living abroad must support their home country's intelligence-gathering efforts. Of the estimated 15 per cent of Chinese nationals who receive government scholarships to study abroad, he said, 'they have to regularly report back to the diplomatic mission. They are active spies'.
Mr Moore did not provide evidence to support his claims. The two University of Texas students, and eight other Chinese students and faculty members interviewed for this article, said they had never once interacted with their government back home, other than during the visa procurement process.
Mr Moore did cite three instances over the past three years when Chinese students had been charged with attempting to gain access to US military information. He said his views on Chinese students were validated by an investigative report published last month by The Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper published by Stanford University students.
The article, 'Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford,' relied on anonymous sources and concluded, 'In short, there are Chinese spies at Stanford.' But the only person named as a spy was a former Stanford researcher, Chen Song, who was charged with visa fraud in 2020 for what the Justice Department said was lying about her affiliation with the Chinese military. The Stanford Review story did not mention that the Justice Department withdrew the fraud charge and four other charges against Song a year later.
A prominent Stanford faculty member quoted in the article, political sociologist Larry Diamond, reaffirmed to The New York Times his concern about 'the dangers of China penetrating our systems and ripping off our technology'. But, Mr Diamond said: 'I am completely opposed to Moore's legislation and think it would be incredibly destructive to our interests.
'This takes a blind sledgehammer to a problem that needs highly targeted tools.'
Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, said that a vast majority of Chinese students in the United States are not here to spy or obtain information for their government.
'Chinese students who come to the United States want to stay and contribute,' she said, adding that three-quarters of Chinese graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math stay in the United States. The number is even higher for doctoral students in artificial intelligence, she noted.
Democratic Representative Grace Meng of New York, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in a statement that the legislation was 'xenophobic and wrongheaded'. She pointed to a survey earlier this year by The Asian American Foundation that found more than 1 in 4 Americans viewed Chinese Americans as a threat to American society. She added that Mr Moore's initiative, if passed, 'would send a dangerous message that people of Chinese descent – and Asian Americans more broadly – do not belong in this country'.
Mr Moore said that he had not discussed the extent of any threat posed by Chinese students with his state's flagship college, West Virginia University, where around 130 Chinese students are enrolled. University officials declined to comment for this article.
One of the bill's seven Republican co-sponsors, Representative Brandon Gill of Texas, said in a statement that 'it's time we start taking seriously the threat of the Chinese Communist Party and the hundreds of thousands of students they send to American universities each year, many of whom have been traced back to its espionage operations'. The statement provided no evidence for that assertion.
Along with Mr Gill, five other co-sponsors – Representatives Troy Nehls of Texas, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Burgess Owens of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania – represent districts in states that President Donald Trump won in November. Republican Senator Ashley Moody of Florida, where Mr Trump was also victorious in November, introduced a similar bill in the Senate.
Each of these states has universities with large Chinese student populations, including the president's alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, with more than 2,000 Chinese students, according to the most recent public data.
'We're literally skimming off the best and brightest China has to offer,' said Peter Lorge, a professor specialising in Chinese military history at Vanderbilt University, which has more than 700 Chinese students. 'They're fighting to come here, and their own country is struggling to get them to come back. The idea that we'd turn them away is baffling to me.'
Mr David Firestein, the president of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations, said in an interview that the thousands of current and former Chinese students living in Texas contribute roughly US$500 million (S$644 million) annually to the state's economy.
'Banning them would be devastating to both our universities and to the state of Texas as a whole,' he said.
His comments were echoed by Di Wang, a professor of history at Texas A&M from 1998 to 2015, who said in an interview that A&M's 'large number of professors and students from China have made substantial contributions to the education, research and exchanges between the people of the US and China'.
Prof Wang described the current approach by Mr Rubio and Mr Moore as 'shortsighted, extreme and detrimental to the US. It would alienate many young Chinese who have a favourable view of the US and wish to learn from it'.
Mr Moore scoffed at the idea that Chinese students experiencing life in an open society would have a salutary effect. 'They've been getting exposed to democratic values since Richard Nixon,' he said. 'That whole paradigm of, 'Let's introduce the free market into China and eventually democracy will flourish' – that's never happened.'
Prof Weiss said that Mr Moore's bill could have unintended consequences for US security. During the Red Scare era of the 1950s, she said, a leading rocket scientist, Qian Xuesen, 'was prevented from continuing his scientific career in the United States,' even though he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
Instead, Qian returned to China, where he helped develop China's ballistic missile system.
Mr Lu, the University of Texas government professor, also referred to the saga of Qian as an example of how the significant contributions by Chinese scholars can be imperiled by fixating on unsubstantiated suspicions. 'It would be like a doctor treating a small skin rash on a shoulder,' he said, 'by amputating the whole arm.' NYTIMES
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