The Trump administration stepped up its offensive against China with new measures that it said were aimed at rooting out espionage and national security risks at America’s colleges and universities.
At a press conference held on the White House lawn Friday afternoon, President Trump said the U.S. would bar Chinese nationals who have an affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, from receiving visas to study or conduct graduate or post-doctoral research in the United States.
In a proclamation released later, the President said the measures were aimed at stopping China from engaging in a “wide-ranging and heavily resourced campaign to acquire sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property” intended to bolster the Chinese military. Undergraduate study by Chinese in the U.S. would not be affected by the new restrictions.
The move, though, was quickly rebuked by college administrators who warned that the Trump administration’s tactics — in combination with its efforts to restrict immigrant work-study visas and ban travel to the U.S. from certain countries — could have dire consequences for the future of America’s universities, cutting into their talent pool, reducing international research cooperation and disrupting progress at labs across the country.
“This could be devastating for American universities,” says Susan Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of California at San Diego and chair of the University’s 21st Century China Center. “If we drive Chinese students away from the U.S. we really undercut our ability to compete.”
If we drive Chinese students away from the U.S. we really undercut our ability to compete.
Susan Shirk, University of California at San Diego
The Trump administration has also suggested recently that it was considering new restrictions on a popular visa program that allows students to extend their stays in the U.S. to work for up to three years after graduating. Republican senators are supporting legislation to suspend the program at a time of high unemployment in the U.S. due to Covid -19 business closures. The program is especially popular among students studying in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — so called STEM fields that attract large numbers of Chinese and Indian students.
Trump’s action on Friday and talk of restrictions on the training program “will reverberate and send a message that the U.S. is not a welcoming place,” says Brad Farnsworth, the vice president for global engagement at the American Council on Education, which represents institutions of higher education in Washington. “It’s part of a long-term trend that is really discouraging all international students,” particularly Chinese students.
(The extended visa program for work, called the Optional Practical Training visa, includes over 223,000 students.)
A growing number of college administrators also fear that increasingly aggressive federal action that targets China could undermine America’s standing as a center for innovation and have a chilling effect on not just Chinese students but students of Asian descent, who could be viewed on campus with greater suspicion.
It’s unclear how the U.S. government plans to enforce the measures — or even how many Chinese graduate students and researchers could be affected. The New York Times reported on Friday that the visa cancellation could affect “at least 3,000 students.” Experts said the wording of the proclamation was broad enough to include many of China’s leading research universities, and not just those directly tied to the People’s Liberation Army.
One Ivy League administrator told The Wire over the weekend that the Chinese military could, for instance, have loose ties to a broad array of top research universities inside China (roughly similar to those between the U.S. Department of Defense and American universities), and that if those schools are included in the ban, the consequences for American higher education would be much more severe, since many of America’s top universities admit students from those schools.
The new rules pose problems because American research universities are heavily dependent on China for graduate students. At many of the country’s elite universities, including Harvard, MIT and Stanford, a large share of graduate students in STEM fields come from China.
Chinese students account for more than a third of the 1.1 million international students now studying at American colleges and universities. The vast majority are undergraduates, but in STEM fields they make up a disproportionate number of graduate students, along with students from India.
The situation is beginning to look ugly for Chinese graduate students in the U.S., because of suspicion that they may be working for the PLA or acting as campus spies, even if they do not come from schools affiliated with the PLA.
“If the U.S. bans Chinese students, in the long term it will lose that highly intelligent labor force,” says Guo Yuanhao, 27, who received a graduate degree in the U.S. and now works in New Jersey for a financial services firm. He plans to return to China, partly because of “the conflict between the U.S. and China.”
What has become clear is this: American universities have become a key battleground in the increasingly bitter rivalry between the U.S. and China, partly fueled by disputes over the global pandemic, China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims in its northwest region of Xinjiang, and Beijing’s increasingly bold moves aimed at gaining greater control over Hong Kong.
The tensions have been brewing for some time. In recent years, the FBI has been investigating cases of intellectual property theft at American universities; and there have been a growing number of studies about Chinese led “influence campaigns” at American universities, aimed at censoring criticism of the Chinese Communist Party or seeking to promote Beijing’s viewpoints. The U.S. authorities have also warned of cyber attacks coming from China and seeking to break into the networks of major universities.
In January, a prominent Harvard chemist, Charles Lieber, and two Chinese nationals were charged with aiding the Chinese government. Lieber, who has pleaded not guilty, was charged with lying about the funding he received from the Chinese government, and Ye Yanqing, a 29-year-old graduate student at Boston University, was accused of “acting as an agent of a foreign government.”
Many concede there are problems on America’s campuses, but say finding a solution that doesn’t undermine the university’s strengths is going to be a challenge.
“They’re going to have to work out the fine print, but this is going to have to be surgery of the most complex form to separate these things,” says Orville Schell, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and now director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. And “however unwelcome and difficult solutions are to execute, if China is really moving into the ‘hostile,’ even ‘enemy,’ column, something needs to be done at universities, especially in STEM fields.”
University administrators have been anticipating more federal action, since the Trump administration announced a travel ban on certain countries in early 2017. Then came more restrictions on immigrant visas and statements from the White House and prominent congressmen about the Chinese students and academics stealing America’s secrets while the universities looked on naively.
One of those who has led a response is L. Rafael Reif, the president of MIT, who wrote in an Aug. 2018 op-ed in The New York Times that the U.S. may not be able to meet the technological challenges posed by China if it surrenders one of its strengths, “the large number of first-rate American universities pursuing advanced research with long-term federal support,” he wrote. “This relationship is rooted in a national culture of opportunity and entrepreneurship, inspired by an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, supported by the rule and law and, crucially, pushed to new creative heights by uniting brilliant talent from every sector of our society and every corner of the world.”
American corporations, many of which depend on foreign talent, are also worried. In a joint letter to President Trump and members of his administration last week, a coalition of 324 companies, including Amazon, Facebook and Google, urged the administration not to restrict non-immigrant visas. The group also emphasized the “importance of the college educated STEM workforce, including nonimmigrants.”
Other experts have weighed in, saying that Silicon Valley — home to America’s leading technology companies and an engine for innovative startups — is also going to feel the effects if the U.S. puts greater restrictions on students and scholars from China.
Elsa B. Kania, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the Alliance For Securing Democracy, wrote in Foreign Policy a few weeks ago that the U.S. crackdown on students studying in the U.S. could, in fact, aid China’s own efforts to upgrade its technology.
“Cutting off the science and technology talent flow from China to the United States would hand China’s party-state the gift of a forfeit in this part of that contest,” the two scholars wrote. “While U.S. policymakers worry about the exfiltration of research from the United States, the Chinese government has been highly concerned about brain drain to the United States, especially in artificial intelligence. The very talent plans and initiatives, like China’s Thousand Talents Program, that have provoked much concern in U.S. policy debates have been attempts to reduce and reverse that loss — to promote ‘brain gain’ instead.”
Jeremy Neufeld, an analyst at Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank, says that the ability of the U.S. “to keep at the frontier of innovation is dependent on its ability to retain talent. Repelling talent really shoots us in the foot.”
University administrators, though, acknowledge that they are in the dark about how the order might be carried out. Some say they were not consulted, and that it’s unclear from the order how broad it could be.
One resource some universities have already used is the China Defence Universities Tracker, a study of the military and security links of Chinese universities published by the Australia Strategic Policy Institute.
Tai Ming Cheung, a security specialist at UC San Diego and author of Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy, said a lot will depend on the definition. “There’s a clear list of PLA universities,” he told The Wire. “But there are also technology focused universities that have links. So how do you define that?”
There are members of Congress, though, who have called for tougher measures. On May 27, Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, introduced new legislation that would prohibit Chinese nationals from receiving visas to the U.S. for graduate studies in STEM fields. “Beijing exploits student and research visas to steal science, technology engineering and manufacturing secrets from U.S. academic and research institutions,” the two wrote in a statement.
Even before they unveiled the proposal, Sen. Cotton had said that Chinese students coming to the U.S. should be restricted to studying liberal arts, or Shakespeare.
Professor Shirk, at UC San Diego, sees it differently: “The idea that we can stop the spread of knowledge is so infeasible and counterproductive,” she said. “We’re in the midst of a ‘red scare.’ If we hound all the Chinese out of the American labs, we’ll harm our own ability to innovate.”
David Barboza is the co-founder and a staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a longtime business reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times. @DavidBarboza2
Eli Binder is a New York-based staff writer for The Wire. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, in Hong Kong and Singapore, as an Overseas Press Club Foundation fellow. @ebinder21