President Trump’s first term gave us the “China Initiative,” a government program intended to root out Chinese espionage. The result was ethnic profiling of Chinese and Asian American researchers, flimsy cases that were eventually dropped and no prosecutions of scholars for spying or theft of secrets. President Joe Biden wisely eliminated it.
Mr. Trump’s current administration is back at it, however, demonizing Chinese citizens once again with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement on May 28 that the United States would “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students. While it appears that Mr. Trump’s team may have backed off on that measure for now after trade negotiations last week, the threat lingers and damage may have been done already.
Targeting Chinese students, researchers and academics was a horrible idea the first time around and still is. It would harm America academically, economically and strategically. It will leave us more ignorant about our biggest rival and fuel paranoia while doing little to safeguard sensitive information.
We should of course be concerned about China’s wide-ranging espionage efforts.
Much of this is focused on the U.S. government or corporations. But universities are targets too. Chinese government tactics are known to include pressuring students from China to gather information on American know-how and innovation from their U.S. colleges, coupled with threats against their families in China if they don’t comply. Innocent students like these are China’s victims, too. We should be devising ways to protect their academic freedom and safety while on U.S. soil. Excluding them en masse blames the victim and throws the baby out with the bath water.
Very little of the research that happens on American campuses is classified, anyway. Many universities forbid it under the principle that academic research should be openly available. Some areas of study are more sensitive than others, but U.S. restrictions and screening procedures already block or restrict visas for Chinese researchers in certain fields. A 2020 Trump executive order, for example, limits entry by graduate students with past or present links to Chinese entities that the United States determines are involved with technologies that have potential military use.
Mr. Rubio’s announcement added worryingly vague new criteria to these already robust standards.
He singled out students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party,” which is almost meaningless for a country where the party runs everything. Just as every American is connected to the U.S. government in some way — getting a driver’s license, paying taxes, going to public schools — dealing with the Communist Party is a fact of life for Chinese citizens, not an ideological commitment.
Mr. Rubio also mentioned students “studying in critical fields.” Does that mean only sensitive technologies, or would the Trump administration’s typically maximalist approach sweep in the social sciences, international relations, even business and finance?
These overly broad and ultimately unnecessary criteria look suspiciously like Mr. Trump’s team may in fact be laying the groundwork to fulfill yet another objective of Project 2025, the right-wing manifesto that has guided Mr. Trump’s second term. The president’s immigration crackdown, elimination of diversity programs, rollback of climate protection measures and other major policy moves are all key items on Project 2025’s wish list, which also calls for the United States to “significantly reduce or eliminate” visas for Chinese students and researchers.
Doing so would hurt America in several ways.
Take trade. Mr. Trump is obsessed with America’s trade deficit with China. But the more than 277,000 Chinese studying legally in the United States contributed more than $14 billion to the economy in 2023, on par with the value of some of American’s top exports to China.
The United States also has benefited from a long-term “brain gain” of Chinese talent. More than 55,000 Chinese nationals graduated with STEM Ph.D.s from U.S. universities from 2001 to 2015, 90 percent of whom stayed in the United States after graduation. Chinese student enrollment in the United States is falling sharply, however, from about 370,000 in 2019, in the wake of the pandemic and deteriorating U.S.-China relations. Restricting Chinese student visas would further erode this American technological advantage.
I have firsthand experience with paranoid academic barriers that end up hurting the country that erects them.
I contributed to a 2004 book on China’s Uyghurs, one of the native peoples of Xinjiang. Uyghurs are a highly sensitive topic for the Communist Party, which seeks to prevent foreign scholars from writing about them because of a history of Uyghur discontent with Chinese rule. China denounced the book as an attempt to incite Uyghur separatism and subsequently refused to grant visas to me and several other American professors who were co-authors.
This backfired for China. We continued to do research, publish books and teach, but we couldn’t visit China and have the frank in-person exchanges we once had with Chinese scholars in Beijing who advised the government. The soured academic atmosphere also meant Chinese experts were no longer welcomed to overseas conferences and other academic exchanges in Uyghur and Xinjiang studies. China lost an important channel through which its scholars accessed new research and kept tabs on how its Xinjiang policies played overseas.
When it emerged in 2018 that China had interned more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in re-education centers, China was unprepared for the global outrage that followed. Chinese officials in Washington scoffed when I told them early on that the world would see these as concentration camps and the country’s treatment of Uyghurs as crimes against humanity and genocide. China fumbled its response, at first issuing flat denials that were transparently false — satellite images of the re-education facilities were available — and repeatedly changing its story. China’s international reputation was severely tarnished, and the United States imposed sanctions.
By constricting academic exchange, China impaired its ability to anticipate the reaction of the United States and the world. If the United States does the same to Chinese scholars, it risks falling into the same trap.
From a hard-nosed U.S. security standpoint, we should be learning all that we can about China. That means maintaining connections, not severing them. Yet Mr. Trump seems bent on blinding us. In his first term he abolished the Fulbright academic exchange program with China, which had sent thousands of American and Chinese students between the two countries for decades. His new administration has gutted Radio Free Asia — whose reporting on Xinjiang, Tibet and China has long been relied upon by Congress and the White House — and canceled funding for efforts to monitor Chinese human rights abuses.
Revoking Chinese student visas would further cut America off from its biggest rival, sacrificing security for spite, knowledge for paranoia and differing little from the Chinese Communist Party’s isolationism. And it destroys the empathy that America should be showing toward fellow human beings in a country that accounts for one-sixth of humanity.
A self-confident America should not fear people from around the world, even rival countries, coming to access the knowledge that all of humankind needs to address our mounting global problems together. Learning is not spying.
James A. Millward, a professor of history at Georgetown University, is the author of “Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang” and “The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction.”
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