Chinese student visa ban will keep US behind the curve

And so it appears the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (see here) was never properly rescinded. The US State Department released the following statement on May 28th:

Under President Trump’s leadership, the US 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.

Chinese international students are caught up in two Trump presidency fixations – to topple elite universities as leftist bastions and to wage economic war on China. The Department of Homeland Security has revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students partially because the university was “coordinating with the CCP on its campus.” The assault on Chinese international students is occurring concurrently with intensified sanctions on semiconductors and export restrictions on commercial aircraft components.

It is difficult to decipher whether headline-grabbing Trump policies are expressions of America’s long-term political direction or just this peculiar president chasing headlines and/or venting momentary frustrations. In recent weeks, Trump has suffered a series of setbacks.

DOGE did not amount to much. The courts blocked Homeland Security from barring international students from Harvard as well as the president’s emergency powers to implement tariffs. China is slow-walking restoration of rare-earth exports, likely in response to new semiconductor-related sanctions.

While it all could be just Trumpian rage, the special focus on Chinese international students does have almost two centuries of historical precedent. Cases of Chinese American scientists accused of espionage, hounded for years by the FBI, bankrupted by legal expenses and ultimately exonerated by the courts are legion.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare originated as a panic in response to “losing China.” Countless Americans were persecuted and blacklisted. Caltech physicist Qian Xuesen was deported to China, where he subsequently founded China National Space Administration (CNSA) and helped develop China’s fission and fusion nuclear bombs.

Revoking Chinese international student visas is just the latest expression of the “yellow peril” which grips the Western world in times of anxiety and stress. Like a witch hunt, a case of yellow peril is only recognizable after the fever has passed – and after many “witches” have been drowned in the river or burned at the stake.

This current witch hunt is occurring at a moment of spectacular historical revelation and is, all things considered, very silly. Debating whether or not Chinese international students pose a security risk is a bit like General Motors debating how to protect its technology from BYD. The US is now behind the curve but refuses to accept it.

In a stroke of infinite woke wisdom, Harvard chose a Chinese international student to speak at one of its graduation ceremonies. She delivered a generic “let us all hold hands and sing Kumbaya” speech, which sounded a lot like President Xi Jinping’s “community with a shared future” to hypervigilant MAGA ears and insufferable Westernized elitism to status-sensitive Chinese ears. It was so Harvard, it hurt.

MAGA haters accused her of being a CCP mole. Weibo (Chinese Twitter) haters accused her of mediocrity by dodging the gaokao (China’s notorious college entrance exam) and getting into Harvard with internships and recommendations secured through family connections. Like most social media hate campaigns, none of these allegations have been substantiated.

What this kerfuffle does reveal is that Harvard, once spoken of with reverence in China, is now mocked, fairly or not, as an institution for China’s mediocre nepo babies. This comes on the heels of a delicious admissions/corruption/sex scandal involving Barnard College (which may or may not be Columbia University) and Beijing Union Medical College, perhaps China’s most prestigious medical school.

Beijing Union Medical College apparently admitted an undistinguished economics major from Barnard College because of her family connections. She committed the additional high crimes of claiming to be a Columbia University graduate, having an affair with her married physician boss and botching a procedure which resulted in her boss/paramour arguing with the head nurse for 40 minutes while a patient remained drugged-out on the operating table.

While applicants to American universities will surely collapse as Trump makes getting a US degree a high-risk proposal, Chinese international students studying in the US last year were already 25% below their 2019 peak. The reputation of American universities has been on a downward trend as China quickly figured out that the students who went overseas often did so to avoid the rigors of preparing for the gaokao.

Many employers have found overseas graduates entitled and not as rigorous as local grads. This ire is not just directed toward graduates of middling institutions but all the way up to the likes of Harvard and Barnard College (which, for the record, is technically part of Columbia University but has its own admissions office and all Barnard grads should know not to claim the technicality – c’mon lady).  

There is a growing understanding that China’s universities, especially elite ones, produce (or at least admit) higher-caliber graduates given admissions through objective examination, which has no room for nonsense like feeding orphans in Tanzania or excellence in ridiculous sports like squash.

Like many things, China is getting in front of the curve. Consider the following two tables of university rankings. In the Nature Index, which tracks the number of publications in 146 top scientific journals, 16 of the top 20 universities are Chinese while three are American. In the Times Higher Education rankings, which weighs multiple factors with faculty and research “reputation” the most important, only two of the top 20 are Chinese while 13 are American.

“Reputation” is subjective by definition and a lagging indicator. Over time, the Times High Education rankings should converge with Nature Index rankings as students and faculty realize that Chinese universities are running away from the pack in research output – in both quantity and quality – especially after Trump threw wrenches into research funding and the pipeline of graduate students.

For naysayers (and there are legion), Nature Index conclusions have been confirmed by similar studies conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Economic Policy (NISTEP), the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Ohio State University, numerous multinational investment banks, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) if not the global economy where China has taken over and dominated industry after industry.

China’s labor market, students and online trolls have cottoned onto the corruption, posturing and mediocrity at the heart of American elite education (see here). Trump is merely putting the final nail in the coffin.

While the Chinese have been getting with the program, what have Americans been doing? The MAGA mob are high-fiving and back-slapping each other – take that Harvard and SeeSeePee Chinese students – as they indulge in momentary delight that foreigners and egghead elites have been taken down a peg. Elite parents stroke their chin and smile imperceptibly, mentally calculating that little Timmy’s Ivy League chances just increased by 9.3537%.

Both reactions are defeatist, nihilistic and an exercise in self-harm. Chinese international students pay full tuition, making up a sizable portion of many university budgets, subsidizing grant and work-study programs.

As mediocre as they may be domestically, elite American universities still hold Chinese international students to a high academic standard, setting a benchmark of excellence. American universities could go the way of American car companies, consigned to eternal mediocrity for lack of international competition.

If America or Americans dispense with their denial and grow a pair, they would get in front of the curve. An American STEM PhD-inclined high school junior (yes, they do exist) should ask themselves what the state of science will be like in 10 years, about the time they will be finishing their PhD programs.

The trend lines are merciless. By 2035, China should have at least lapped the US in research output, perhaps multiple times if international graduate students abandon the US en masse.

China will likely be the center of all important scientific inquiry. To not have access is to be permanently on the outside. Any forward-thinking policymaker in Washington should recognize this eventuality and devise programs to send tens if not hundreds of thousands of American students to China.

But of course, forward-thinking policymakers do not exist in Washington. That, however, does not prevent individual Americans from recognizing the obvious.