Topline
The Trump administration on Wednesday revoked the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students deemed “high-risk” and suspected of having ties to China’s military, months after President Donald Trump hinted at the move, but some affected students are rejecting Washington’s claims in what may turn out to be a blunder, saying that they have only ever attended high schools loosely affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.
More than 1,000 Chinese students have been targeted by the Trump administration's decision
Key Facts
The move comes two months out from the U.S. election, the runup of which has seen Trump pick fights with Beijing over trade, national security, the pandemic and now education.
The U.S. State Department said it had declined visas for "high-risk graduate students and research scholars,” and were a “small” number of the hundreds and thousands of Chinese students who enroll at U.S. universities each year.
It added in a statement: “We continue to welcome legitimate students and scholars from China who do not further the Chinese Communist Party's goals of military dominance.”
China on Thursday accused the U.S. of racial discrimination over the move, with foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian labelling it a violation of the students’ human rights.
The decision follows a New York Times report in May, citing American officials, that said the Trump administration was looking to revoke the visas of at least 3,000 Chinese students in universities thought to have ties to China’s People's Liberation Army.
Big Number
370,000. That’s the number of Chinese students who enrolled in U.S. institutions in the 2018-2019 academic year, according to the BBC. The U.S.’ move impacts the biggest international student population across U.S. universities, while Reuters estimates that Chinese students in the U.S. generate $14 billion in economic activity.
What To Watch For
How U.S. universities—who rely heavily on tuition fees from Chinese students, as the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted—will react to the move and its implications. Chinese students in the U.S. make up for one-third of all international students nationwide.
Chief Critic
Chinese students with only tenuous links to military-affiliated universities have shared their education information on a Google Drive spreadsheet as part of a claim that they were wrongly targeted. Foreign Policy editor James Palmer suggested that the information from the spreadsheet suggests that American officials blundered in targeting any Chinese institution with a military-sounding name, tweeting: “It's possible that this is a *deliberate* move as part of an attempt to seriously reduce Chinese students numbers. But it's also quite likely sheer incompetence from officials just told to look for X set of names who don't recognize the difference.”
Key Background
Education has become a new battleground in President Donald Trump's campaign to strike back against China. American colleges reliant on tuition from international students and Chinese students have been caught in the crossfire from this policy and moves in 2018 to limit visas for Chinese STEM scholars. Where colleges see valuable students and future PHDs, the Trump administration sees potential spies branding Chinese post-grads as "non-traditional collectors of intellectual property" back in May. With reports that the FBI is scouring campuses for alleged spies, and the issue of intellectual property theft one of the major fault lines in the trade dispute between the world's two largest economies the scrutiny Chinese students wanting to study abroad in the United States is only likely to escalate.
Further Reading
Report: U.S. To Pull Study Visas From Chinese Students Linked To Military Schools In China (Forbes)
