Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: The Trump administration flip-flops on Chinese student visas, U.S.-China trade talks continue in London, and a Beijing judge makes a heist.
Washington Fixates on Party Politics
U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have gone back and forth on restricting Chinese student visas in recent weeks. On May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to “aggressively revoke” the visas, especially those belonging to students with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
But following Trump’s call with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, the U.S. president said that “Chinese students are coming—no problem. It’s our honor to have them, frankly.”
These inconsistencies aside, there’s a fundamental problem with going after CCP connections: Party membership isn’t particularly ideological, and the immigrants that U.S. authorities prefer—educated, wealthy, and on a legal path to citizenship—are more likely to be CCP members than other groups.
The distinction may not matter for members of the U.S. far-right movement, who are increasingly transparent about their desire to bar nonwhite people from entering the country or to stir up panic about socialist infiltrators. But it should matter if the United States aims to have a policy that treats the CCP as a serious foe without catching innocent people in the crossfire.
Washington’s misunderstanding of CCP membership is long-standing. Take Yang Jianli, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, long-term dissident, and Foreign Policy contributor. Yang was studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, when he returned to Beijing to participate in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Afterward, he was given refugee status in the United States.
When Yang returned to China in 2002 to observe labor unrest, he was arrested and imprisoned for five years, and lawmakers in Washington repeatedly pressured China for his release. Despite Yang’s impeccable credentials as an opponent of the CCP, he was blocked from becoming a U.S. citizen in 2020 because he was a CCP member at one point in his life.
As Yang told me over email, “I voluntarily disclosed my past membership during my naturalization interview. I … submitted evidence of my expulsion from the Party after the Tiananmen Massacre and included affidavits explaining why many young intellectuals like myself joined the Party and later had to mark ‘no’ on visa forms.”
“Despite this, my application was rejected. I sued [the Department of Homeland Security] and eventually reached a settlement,” he wrote.
U.S. paranoia about communist or anarchist immigration dates back to the first Red Scare of the 1920s, but it was fully introduced into U.S. law during the McCarthy era, with the Internal Security Act of 1950. Its ban of so-called totalitarian parties has lingered in U.S. immigration policy.
There are exceptions for inactive membership (after five years), those who joined before the age of 16, and those who joined in order to survive. But as Yang’s case shows, even applicants that clearly fall into these categories can have problems.
This approach came about at a time when most U.S. policymakers were convinced that communism was an apocalyptic threat that sought to undermine free societies from within. Although this fear was overblown, it at least had some basis in the Soviet Union’s support for communism in Angola, Cuba, Vietnam, and beyond.
China pursued a similar strategy under leader Mao Zedong—often competing with the Soviet Union for influence, as was the case in Albania and Tanzania. But the CCP largely abandoned that policy in the 1980s.
Today, CCP members in the United States aren’t forming revolutionary cells or plotting with U.S. communists. They are more likely to be starting businesses or pursuing an education. This is partly because CCP membership is determined not by ideological zeal but by family connections and personal or career ambitions.
Roughly 40 percent of new CCP members are students, particularly from elite universities, and within China, party membership is a prerequisite to most positions of power. The Communist Youth League (CYL), which accepts members starting at age 14, is another CCP feeder and is overwhelmingly concentrated in elite schools.
Joining the CCP requires a mastery of communist ideas and attendance at party meetings, but many people treat these tasks as a tiresome chore rather than a call to revolutionary action. Actually supporting workers on Marxist grounds can get you arrested, as what happened to students at Beijing’s elite Renmin University in 2018.
So, why does the United States see CCP membership as a security threat?
One worry is that members will establish party cells in the United States, which has taken place at some universities. But Beijing uses propaganda, coercion, and monitoring against the whole Chinese diaspora, and instances of targeting Chinese abroad specifically tied to their party membership are rare. A student who belongs to the CCP is no more or less vulnerable to pressure than one who doesn’t.
And, critically, because CCP members—thanks to recruitment biases—tend to be better educated, their decision to stay in the United States would be a win for Washington in the growing race for global talent. Ultimately, the CCP is a party of connected strivers, not revolutionary conspirators.
What We’re Following
Trade talks. U.S. and Chinese negotiators are meeting in London this week in pursuit of a trade deal. This follows renewed tensions, as each side’s government has accused the other of failing to keep promises related to the temporary tariff cease-fire.
Following Trump and Xi’s convivial phone call on June 5, negotiations appear to be going well. The U.S. side, however, seems a bit panicked: Trump has reportedly authorized negotiators to lift some U.S. sanctions on chips and other exports. Trump might be eager to make a deal after China’s recent limits on rare earth exports exposed vulnerabilities in U.S. military supply chains.
But any agreement is likely to be fragile, held hostage by presidential whim and Trump’s tendency to talk big but pull back at the last minute. Typically, trade negotiations take months to years, which doesn’t work for a White House that’s obsessed with the immediate news cycle. I’d take anything that comes out of these talks with a grain of salt.
Judicial heist. A Beijing judge named Bai Bin has reportedly absconded with somewhere between $18 and $41 million, apparently stolen from court fines and processing fees. Authorities were tipped off after Bai’s girlfriend bragged to friends that he had obtained citizenship in Greece, which has had a limited extradition treaty with China since 2019.
Corruption is common in Chinese courts, but it usually comes in the form of bribes rather than embezzlement. Efficiency reforms that occurred in the late 2010s, which allowed for the transfer of court funds to be approved by a single person, may have given the young judge the opportunity to pull off his theft. Bai is still on the run, but the heist will likely result in a wider crackdown on the courts and the control of fines.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Putin Is a Gambler, not a Grand Master by Anastasia Edel
- What Is the Impact of Ukraine’s Raid on Russia’s Air Force? by Franz-Stefan Gady
- How Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Drone Attack Depends on Trump by John Haltiwanger
Tech and Business
TikTok ban. Trump continues to disregard the 2024 law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest or see the app face a nationwide ban in the United States. Last week, reports emerged that Trump is planning to extend what may be an illegal suspension of enforcement for a third time as he seeks to find a U.S. buyer friendly to his administration.
Any buyer, however, will be hard-pressed to overcome Beijing’s reluctance to put a key asset in foreign hands—especially as the U.S.-China relationship remains so tumultuous.
Exports shrink. Despite the pause in the spiraling trade war with the United States, Chinese export growth in May still dropped more than expected to just 4.8 percent in dollar terms, down from 8.1 percent in April.
Most of that was caused by a stunning 34.6 percent drop in shipments to the United States compared to May 2024, though redirecting goods to other markets still meant overall growth.
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