On May 28th, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department will “aggressively” revoke visas of Chinese students. The department’s official statement has also claimed that the U.S. “will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.” The move serves as a continuation of President Donald Trump’s aggressive policies on education reform, especially targeting Chinese infiltration in the ranks of American universities.
According to Voice of America, Chinese students continue to be one of the largest international student populations in the U.S., with the highest enrollment number for Chinese students at 372,532 in the 2019-2020 academic year. However, worsening U.S.-China relations, COVID-19, and the deteriorating Chinese economy are all roadblocks that persists to slash international student numbers: “The 2022-2023 school year, with 289,526 Chinese students, is the lowest number since the 2013-2014 academic year when 274,439 Chinese students attended U.S. colleges and universities.”
The aggressive U.S. policies against China can be traced back to 2018, when the first Trump administration pushed “to levy investment restrictions and roughly $60 billion worth of tariffs on China in response to its widespread violation of U.S. intellectual property rights.” For many experts, this signifies that Washington will no longer overlook China’s systematic efforts to acquire American technology, fundamentally changing U.S.-China relations. President Trump’s transactional foreign policy direction has also directly impacted the eligibility of Chinese students seeking higher education in the United States. Various restrictions and visa revocations were implemented by the U.S. since 2020, aiming to combat China’s military-civil fusion strategy, which reportedly stole key technologies from American universities.
The second Trump administration enforced those restrictions on a much broader scale. In a State Department briefing on May 29th, Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said that 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,” but refused to detail the department’s vetting process for visa revocations. In a report released by the Washington Post, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller further hinted that the policy shift was also about downgrading the status of foreign students compared to U.S. counterparts, in the interest of promoting American genius: “We cannot have a policy in America where every citizen of this country, whether looking for a job, whether they’re looking for housing, whether they’re looking for a government benefit in a time of need, has to compete with all of planet Earth.”
As a Chinese international student myself, there is definitely a degree of uncertainty and anxiety observed amongst us. I am currently entering my second year of graduate school, feeling sympathy for all my peers who are denied from some of the world’s best institutions. Regarding the concerns from the Trump administration towards Chinese students, I have heard about some scholars, sponsored by the Chinese government, residing in the ranks of American universities. However, most of us are just like the 1.1 million international students who leave their homes in search of better education and a better life for themselves. The United States is renowned for its excellent education, economic prosperity, and a more democratic society. It is also known for its inclusivity and broad demographic. It is heartbreaking for many of us to see a country built by immigrants becoming more xenophobic and hostile to the rest of the world.
During my coordination on the situation with Al Jazeera English, I have also reached out to some of my peers who are facing the same concerns. Some cancelled trips back to China, while some chose to voice concerns about the ineffectiveness of a broad-scale vetting process. As the relationship between China and the U.S. continues to deteriorate, those targeted measures continue to affect the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in the United States.
