Rising geopolitical conflicts and trade wars are affecting people-to-people exchanges between the United States and China as Washington tightens its student visa issuance.
Over the past month, the Trump administration has reportedly revoked visas of more than a thousand international students without providing concrete reasons.
Some media reports said the move could be related to an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump in late January 2025 to probe into international students who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses or published pro-Hamas posts on social media last year.
Most of the international students who recently lost their visas come from China. The others are from India and Iran.
According to Inside Higher Education, a specialist publication, as of April 16 at least 1,300 overseas students and recent graduates at more than 200 US institutions had seen their “legal status changed” in recent weeks.
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) confirmed that 35 students have had their F-1 visas revoked, with one student being “detained at the border, denied entry, and deported to their home country.” International students need F-1 visas to study in the US, or they will be deported.
In an article, a Shandong-based Chinese columnist says the US government’s recent revocation of international students’ visas is a political campaign. He says the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is now investigating many of those who published pro-Palestine social media posts or joined related protests.
“The US government’s move may look like to be a crackdown on certain violations of regulations, but in fact, the government wants to create a chilling effect during a sensitive period,” the writer says, referring to the trade war. “Targeting international students can please domestic hardliners and suppress large-scale protests.”
He says it’s ridiculous that an Indian student, who posted on Instagram a picture showing children in Gaza, was asked by Immigration officers to explain whether he has any connections to Hamas.
He adds that this “witch hunt” not only affects many top global talents but also hurts American universities’ income.
The South China Morning Post reported on April 17 that some Chinese parents who had planned to send their children to the US for education had changed their minds after learning that the US had revoked the visas of hundreds of international students.
Citing a Shanghai-based study-abroad agent, the SCMP said some parents wanted their children to switch from Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum to International Baccalaureate (IB) or A-level. The AP curriculum is for applying to American universities, while the IB and A-level are for universities in Europe and the United Kingdom.
On April 11, four Chinese students filed a lawsuit in California after the US government revoked the visas of at least 529 students, faculty members and researchers from 88 American universities.
Clay Zhu, an attorney and managing partner at DeHeng Law Offices’ Silicon Valley office who represents the plaintiffs, said 36 international students from 30 universities across the US had submitted written declarations to a local court over the weekend of April 12-13.
Zhu said 31 are from the Chinese mainland, one from Taiwan, three from Iran and one from India. He added that the lawsuit is intended to protect the rights of all affected international students. A judge will issue a decision within a few days.
Trump’s executive order
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist political group, carried out a cross-border attack on Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages. Israel launched a military action in the Gaza Strip, causing the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Palestinian people.
Last year, many pro-Palestine students held protests on dozens of university campuses in the US.
On January 29, Trump signed an Executive Order to combat anti-semitism. He said his 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism found that students faced anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses. He said that after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Jewish students in the US have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination and harassment.
On March 27, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US had revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students.
“If you say you’re coming not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos, we’re not giving you that visa,” said Rubio.
On many occasions since October 2023, Beijing officials have criticized Israel’s military action in Gaza and reaffirmed China’s support for a Palestinian state.
Many Chinese students in the US echoed Beijing’s stance by posting pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas messages on their social media accounts and joining protests on campuses, but many of them now feel regret.
On April 9, China’s Ministry of Education released an overseas study alert urging Chinese students to assess security risks and raise their awareness of precautions if they consider studying in certain US states. On the same day, the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism said tourists should fully assess the risks of travelling to the US.
Both warnings can be seen in the context of China’s retaliatory measures against the Trump administration’s 145% tariff on all Chinese goods.
Other concerns
In 2024, there were about 1.1 million international students in the US. In the academic year 2023/24, the number of Chinese students in the US was 277,398, 4.2% down from 289,526 in 2022/23 or 25.5% down from the historical peak of 372,532 in 2019/2020, according to Statista.com.
US Congressman Riley Moore on March 14 introduced the Stop Chinese Communist Prying by Vindicating Intellectual Safeguards in Academia Act (Stop CCP VISAs Act), saying that Chinese students have been caught in several cases spying on the US military or stealing advanced technology from American companies.
“Every year, we allow nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals to come to the US on student visas. We’ve invited the CCP to spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security,” Moore said. “Congress needs to end China’s exploitation of our student visa program. It’s time we turn off the spigot and immediately ban all student visas going to Chinese nationals.”
Moore’s call came after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last October charged five Chinese students, who were caught photographing joint US-Taiwan live-fire military exercises near a military site in Michigan. The alleged incident happened in August 2023.
The five were accused of lying to investigators about their trip to Michigan and conspiring to delete photos from their phones. They graduated from the University of Michigan in spring 2023. They were enrolled in a joint program between the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
“For decades, the failed post-Cold War consensus assumed China would democratize and liberalize if we welcomed them into our markets, media, and universities,” said US Senator Ashley Moody, who supports the Stop CCP VISAs Act. “Instead, the CCP took advantage of Americans’ goodwill and subversively exported agents to our shores to spy, oppress dissidents and enemies of the state, and steal publicly funded research and intellectual property to the tune of billions of dollars.”
A Guangdong-based writer says that if the US forbids Chinese students from studying there, its universities will lose top students and huge incomes, as international students pay several times more than local students.
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