Chinese Students in the US: Collateral Damage

For years, the United States has been the top destination for Chinese studying abroad.

However, as tensions between China and the United States over both trade and security issues mount to their highest point in at least two decades, many Chinese students feel that they have become collateral damage amid the national struggle.

From Washington’s perspective, Chinese students seem increasingly like potential “spies” for the Chinese government and “thieves” of American technology and research. On the other hand, those Chinese who were educated in the United States, in Beijing’s eyes, have been contaminated by Western thoughts and thus cannot be wholly trusted. 

Such a contradictory situation has left Chinese students in the United States in an awkward position.

Chinese Students: Under Fire From Both Sides

Students from China have dominated the U.S. international student market for years.

Data from the U.S. government’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) shows that in the 2016-17 school year, a total of 350,755 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. universities, accounting for 32.5 percent of the total 1.08 million international students in the United States. In comparison, Indian students, the second biggest source of U.S. international students, accounted for only 17 percent of the total.

Financially, the United States has the highest tuition fees for international students of any country worldwide – an average of $24,914 annually. Thus it’s fair to say that Chinese students as a whole have contributed more than any other group of international students to the U.S. economy. To some degree, Chinese students have “saved America's colleges,” as Bloomberg put it in a 2016 article.

However, these “saviors” of American colleges are now being regarded as a threat by the current U.S. administration.

In February, FBI Director Chris Wray publicly fired the first shot against Chinese students. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, he said: “One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end. And I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us.”

Specifically, he claimed that Chinese information “collectors” have infiltrated U.S. universities.

“I would just say that the use of nontraditional collectors – especially in the academic setting, whether it's professors, scientists, students – we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” Wray added.

Although Wray’s remarks aroused some criticism – some Americans tried to argue “why Chinese students aren’t a threat,” as one article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was titled – hostility against Chinese students only loomed larger in the following months.

In early June, the Associated Press reported that Washington planned to shorten the length of validity for some visas issued to Chinese citizens. In particular, according to a U.S. official, the State Department has instructed U.S. embassies and consulates to limit Chinese graduate students’ visas to a one-year period if they are studying in fields related to the “Made in China 2025” program, like robotics, aviation, and high-tech manufacturing.

In late June, 26 members of Congress urged U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to launch an investigation into possible attempts by Chinese organizations “including Chinese nationals” to steal research and technology from U.S. universities, according to Politico.

Most ironically, however, the Chinese government doesn’t trust overseas students either.

Long before tensions between Beijing and Washington emerged, China had already launched a campaign to “prevent Western values from infiltrating Chinese classrooms.” At the same time, China aims to instill patriotism into Chinese students, particularly students overseas.

Under the instructions of Chinese President Xi Jinping (also the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s National Security Committee), China’s government has placed a new emphasis on weeding out spies. Beijing issued the Counter-Espionage Law in November 2014, the National Security Law in July 2015, and the Counterterrorism Law in December 2015, and designated April 15 as “National Security Education Day.”

In 2017, China’s state news TV station, CCTV, publicly claimed that six types of people are “most likely to be the prey of espionage agents” – veterans; amateur military enthusiasts; employees of the military and defense industry; young netizens; college students and professors; and, notably, students studying abroad.

Then, as the U.S.-China trade war brewed, some of the more hawkish commentators in China saw another use for Chinese students in America. Global Times, one of China's most belligerent tabloids, published an editorial in January suggesting that China could limit the flow of Chinese students to the United States as one of China’s countermeasures. Chinese students in the United States – who are most likely to become foreign spies in Beijing’s eyes – suddenly are now being viewed as a useful political weapon.

History Repeats Itself

To look at the chaos from a wider angle, willingly or not, those Chinese who are being or have been educated in the United States are simply repeating history.

Throughout history, many Chinese people with U.S. educational backgrounds have been forced to choose sides during the ups and downs of U.S.-China relations; for some, even that choice was denied them.

Before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over the country in 1949, China, ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT), had intimate ties with the United States. These ties were particularly strong during late World War II, when the KMT depended heavily on the United States for support to fight Japan.

Against this background, liberals who had been trained abroad, especially in the United States, were regarded as the cornerstone of China’s modernization. Leading Chinese universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University were largely staffed by faculties with foreign backgrounds.

According to John King Fairbank’s The United States and China, even after six years of war with Japan, the faculty of the Southwest Associated University created in Kunming through the cooperation of Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University had more than 170 professors, out of 200, who had received advanced training abroad. Of this 170, more than 100 had earned doctoral degrees in the United States.

However, this very group of intellectuals – returned students from the West who chose to stay in mainland China after the KMT’s loss in the civil war – suffered the most political torture when China and the United States became enemies under Mao Zedong. Not only did these intellectuals have to give up their positions and go through public shaming, self-criticism, and confession, they were physically beaten and tortured – many to death – during the Cultural Revolution, under accusations of having connections with the evil American imperialists.

Decades later, China and the United States tried to re-establish relations under the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Despite the fact that the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao himself, hadn’t yet come to an end in the early 1970s, when Nixon arrived in China, the CCP again found the utility of those long-abandoned intellectuals with U.S. backgrounds.

According to Fairbank’s Chinabound: A Fifty Year Memoir, in an attempt to charm Fairbank himself (one of the most influential China hands in the United States, who had stayed in China for years in the 1930s and 1940s), the CCP sent some of Fairbank’s remaining old Chinese friends – including philosopher Jin Yuelin and political scientist Qian Duansheng, both of whom had U.S. educational backgrounds – to accompany Fairbank during his first visit to CCP-ruled China in early 1970s. But after the political task of accompanying Fairbank was completed, some of these intellectuals were soon sent back to “re-education through labor” camps.

When Deng Xiaoping finally opened China up after Mao’s death, the destiny of those remaining returned students from the West changed dramatically again. They were then treated as if they were national treasures. Many of them – as long as they were still alive, capable, and willing – were sent to the United States as well as to other Western countries as China’s representatives to win back the heart of the free world.  

This period of history – particularly the Cultural Revolution – has been intentionally played down by the Chinese government, so few Chinese students studying abroad now have had the chance to probe into it.

However, a better understanding of the big picture throughout recent history may help those Chinese who are or have been educated in the United States to know where they stand collectively as a group, particularly at a time when national tensions are on the rise and the future is uncertain.