On May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on the U.S. State Department website a policy directive intended to worsen relations between the United States and China. It is titled, “New Visa Policies Put America First, Not China.” The text begins,
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
This follows a series of extraordinary steps by the Trump administration to deter foreign students from studying in the U.S., ranging from ordering U.S. embassies to pause new student visa appointments, to revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll any foreign students. On May 27, U.S. embassies began pausing visa applications in order to expand “social media screening and vetting.”
The number of Chinese students in the U.S., after peaking in 2019-2020 at 372,000, has fallen to 270,000 in 2023-24. This is mainly due to rising tensions, although some of it is due to the 2019-2021 COVID 19 pandemic.
The standard of the U.S. government is that it wants to purge any student who is “connected to the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP). Zichen Wang, a research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a non-government Beijing think-tank, pointed out that there are 99 million Chinese citizens who are members of the CCP, and that if one counts friends and relatives that almost anyone, by that definition, is related to the CCP, reports CNN today.
Fewer than 1,000 American students are studying in China. In November 2023, President Xi Jinping pointedly stated that China is ready to invite 50,000 American students to China over the next five years.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning stated today that the Rubio decision to threaten to “revoke Chinese student visas is fully unjustified. It uses ideology and national security as pretext…. It seriously hurts the lawful rights and interests of international students from China, and disrupts people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.”
The United States sees China surging ahead in physical economic terms, and the U.S. does not—or refuses to—understand that this arises from the type of system a nation follows: either dirigistic Hamiltonianism (China) or wild speculation (the United States).
In 1882, the U.S. signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from the U.S. for ten years. It produced no benefit to the United States.
