Geopolitical tensions dim prospects for US-China exchanges

Reports of Chinese students being turned back at United States airports despite having valid student visas, and recent remarks by senior US administration officials on the need to move away from over-reliance on Chinese researchers have signalled what some academics see as a “ratcheting up” of the science and technology rivalry between China and the US.

Wider geopolitical tensions are leading to a cooling of academic and student exchanges between the two countries, which both sides have said they want to restore after they came to a virtual halt during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January this year China Science Daily, a newspaper run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, posted on its WeChat blog a detailed story written by a fifth-year PhD student at Yale University writing under the pseudonym of Meng Fei who was detained by US customs at Washington Dulles Airport upon her return in December to further her research in cell biology.

The blog described interrogations in what was referred to as “a little dark room” as well as body searches. The student said she was held for at least 12 hours in solitary confinement before being sent back to China and barred from entering the US for five years.

Other cases have emerged of Chinese students and scholars interrogated and forcibly deported upon entering the US at the Washington Dulles Airport and Dallas Airport.

In April Chinese official media said when asked for the reasons for the deportations that US law enforcement personnel said it was because of bad US-China relations.

In April the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 Chinese students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023, and it had complained to the US authorities about each case.

The exact number cannot be verified as the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency does not provide detailed statistics about refusals at airports.

Official Chinese media this week reported that four Chinese students with “scientific and technical backgrounds” recently travelled to the US to study and participate in academic conferences.

They were subjected to harassment, interrogation and repatriation. Two of them have research interests in artificial intelligence, according to a report in the official China Daily newspaper.

“US Customs and Border Protection officers took the four Chinese individuals to a darkened room for more than 10 hours of continuous interrogation, repeatedly questioning them with a baiting, coercive approach,” China Daily said, quoting sources.

The officers “paid particular attention to political backgrounds such as CPC (Chinese Communist Party) membership, and to scientific research backgrounds related to computers”, one of the sources was quoted as saying. At least three of the four were repatriated to China.

According to China Daily, in recent years the US has conducted “unwarranted harassment, interrogation and repatriation” of more than 30 Chinese students majoring in computer-related fields, though it also noted these were incomplete statistics.

The majority are masters or doctoral degree candidates, with more than half of them PhD candidates, and most of them studying in well-known universities in the US, it said.

Their research interests cover fields such as artificial intelligence, information science, network security, electronics, software engineering and electronic information engineering.

Academics have noted these are often disciplines linked to dual civilian-military use, which has become a focus of US export controls which affect collaborations with China.

Possible links to military universities

According to US academics, most of the Chinese students affected have ties to seven military-linked universities in China, collectively known as the ‘Seven Sons of National Defence’ and listed by the US under its export control regime.

However, a US policy of barring students and researchers linked to them has never been explicitly confirmed.

“It has not been announced as public policy,” said David Zweig, professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and author of a forthcoming book The War for Chinese Talent in America, the politics of technology and knowledge in Sino-US relations.

Zweig told University World News the administration of US President Joe Biden, has “never formally said students with any undergraduate experience at [those universities] should not apply to come to the US”.

However, he pointed to the growing importance of national security in student and scholarly flows. “National security will be the priority on which students are going to be able to get in or not get in; that’s from the American side,” he said.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank, which also receives US State Department funding and which monitors Chinese university military links, estimates that not just the ‘Seven Sons’, but many more Chinese universities have links to the Chinese military, including 95 civilian universities.

European universities continue to team up with the ‘Seven Sons’ a POLITICO analysis of a database of EU-funded research shows. But they too may come under pressure from the US.

Increased vetting

“Clearly, going forward, they [US officials] are not going to allow STEM students with any kind of possible military background into the United States,” Zweig said.

He noted that the State Department now carries out in-depth analysis of who the student visa applicants [from China] are and where they went to university. “They want that information and the reason they want this information is, I think, to stop these people,” he said.

US universities have vetting systems, said Zweig, “but they vet based on quality of students and [whether they] are fraudulent in what they put on their CV. Universities do not vet based on national security”.

Zweig explained: “This is now a ratcheting up, long term. There will be a tightening in terms of who will be allowed to come and study in the United States.”

‘Curtail and limit’ access to the US

Few expect any official announcements to this effect, but many academics and university officials sat up and took notice this week when Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, Washington’s number two foreign policy official, pointed to possible curbs on Chinese researchers.

While noting that “some level of people-to-people, society-to-society engagement between the United States and China” is necessary, Campbell said at an event organised by the Council for Foreign Relations think tank in Washington on 24 June: “I do think it is possible to curtail and limit certain kinds of access [to the US by Chinese students] and we have seen that generally, particularly in technology programmes across the United States.”

Campbell alluded to the sensitivity of science and technology research, saying: “Frankly, I would like to see more Chinese students that are coming to the United States to study the humanities and social sciences, not particle physics”.

While he acknowledged that there are not enough Americans in STEM-related fields, Campbell said he would nonetheless “resist” the “recommendation” that most international students should be from China.

“I believe that the largest increase that we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students that come to study in American universities in a range of technology and other fields,” Campbell said.

Pivoting away from China

Some have interpreted this as a move away from China and a pivot towards India on research and technology in general.

Denis Simon, former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in China, is now working with universities in China to expand exchanges and collaboration with the US that have not recovered since the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reduced the number of US students in China and all but curtailed US faculty visits up until last year.

He told University World News he had been optimistic about prospects for increased US-China academic exchanges until Campbell’s remarks. “This does not bode well,” he noted.

“Without students coming from China, we [the US] would be in a sad state of affairs,” said Simon.

“We can’t just have students all coming from India either, because the political winds may shift suddenly and India may no longer be friendly to us,” he said, referring to India’s current close ties with Russia and throughout the Cold War.

Simon pointed to a “lingering fear” that the US approach was “doing immense damage to the potential for using higher education and research collaboration to rebuild trust”.

He added: “Prior to the (2017-2021) Trump administration, science and technology and higher education were bedrock elements in the US-China relationship. Now they have become the cause célèbre for the anti-China group.”

He said this was disheartening for those like himself who have wanted to rebuild bridges.

Securitisation of higher education

New espionage laws in China that widen the scope of activities that can be considered state secrets are among a set of measures taken by the Chinese government, pointing to increased prioritisation of national security, and are seen as a deterrent to academic and student exchanges, including with the US.

Brian Wong, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) who is researching the interaction between geopolitics, political and moral philosophy, and technology, told a seminar at HKU in early June that “both Washington and Beijing see higher education now as a path [towards] … wider trends of great power diplomacy”.

But he also pointed to an increased “securitisation” of higher education exchanges – a reference to the US propensity to see China as a national security issue, and China’s focus on national security generally.

“This casts exchanges with China in a geostrategic light”, leading to additional scrutiny of academic and student exchanges as a possible threat, Wong said. “Security agencies tend to look at higher education as a useful conduit [for espionage].

“Securitisation has now manifested through border searches and interrogation on the US borders, and exit bans being imposed upon individuals in the (Chinese) mainland,” he said.

China’s increased use of exit bans has had a particularly chilling effect on Chinese scholars overseas with family in China, raising fears that they might not be able to return to the US following a visit.

Even US academics who have been able to travel to China since last year say they were “tightly restricted” in what they were allowed to do while they were there.

“There’s no evidence to suggest that academics are in fact more likely than non-academics to be spies. But it is getting much easier for them to be targeted – academics, young researchers, students alike – by the relevant security and conference agencies, as compared with non-academic occupations.”

Wong added: “Given the pressure on politicians to out-hawk one another in the US, as well as increasingly mainstream views of both the Chinese and American establishments that the two countries are locked in bitter, intense rivalry, improvements in bilateral relations should not be expected any time soon.”

Negotiating the landscape

There are still attempts to work around the growing restrictions, but these are hampered by lack of transparency. US officials and academics have always had to work around opaque or unspecified rules when dealing with China; now the same is true of Chinese dealings with the US on research and technology.

Simon noted that in talks with Chinese universities that are still eager to resume exchanges and collaborations with US universities, the main concern is the lack of clarity on what areas or disciplines are off-limits for the US.

“The Chinese have been asking what fields are in the clear and what fields are either already constrained implicitly, or going to be constrained so we can stay clear of those,” noted Simon. “And we say: well, we don’t know!”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping last November said he wanted to attract some 50,000 US students to China in the next five years.

Simon is currently working on higher education dialogues between the US and China to figure out “how can we push forward on the 50,000 students offer made by Xi Jinping and others?

“How can we get more American students to study in China, not because we want to make Xi Jinping happy, necessarily, but because America needs to have people who know something about China and have been up close and personal with Chinese people on the ground in China.”

But they are also having to stay clear of “the problem areas that concern both governments and still allow there to be a fruitful engagement”. He noted public land-grant universities in the US in particular “find it difficult to operate in a way that is not consistent with the State Department protocols”.

Many education agents have noted that it is difficult to attract US students to China in the current climate.

From around 11,000 US students in China before the pandemic (and 15,000 in 2015, pre-Donald Trump’s presidency), the numbers have dropped to around 300 in the past year, rising to around 800 this year.

Zweig does not see much prospect of the 50,000 target being met, particularly in the current climate.

“Xi Jinping has said it, so it becomes internal policy. It has become a “mini-movement” in China, and there is more pressure on them [universities] for sure. Everybody’s got to make efforts now to get more foreign students to apply. But you can’t make US students go to China.”

However, if the drive for US students fails to reach the target, they’ll blame it on the Americans, according to Zweig.

Blame game

The blame game has already started. China’s official media is critical of Nicholas Burns, Washington’s ambassador in Beijing, who has maintained that China has actively undermined people-to-people exchanges, interrogating and intimidating citizens who attend US-organised events in China, and “whipping up anti-American sentiment”.

Burns said in a widely quoted interview with The Wall Street Journal at the US Embassy in Beijing and published this week that China made it harder for Chinese students to attend US universities.

He said university fairs across China have rescinded invitations for US diplomatic staff to promote American colleges to high-school students and their parents, citing ideological or national security concerns.

Roughly half of participants chosen for US-funded exchange programmes, amounting to dozens of people, have pulled out over the past two years, pointing to pressure from authorities, schools and employers, he said.

“What they tell us and what they tell the world is that they want people-to-people engagement, and yet this [tendency to cancel] is not just episodic. This is routine. This is nearly every public event,” Burns said.

Burns has also dismissed Chinese complaints of US border controls and repatriations, saying more than 99% of student visa holders clear immigration without incident. The US issued some 105,000 new student visas to Chinese citizens in 2023, the highest since before the pandemic, he said.

The often strident Chinese official newspaper Global Times referred to both Burns and Campbell in recent commentaries, castigating the US for “seeing China as an opponent rather than a partner and viewing the US-China relationship as a risk rather than an opportunity, which has led to contradictory actions, such as claiming to welcome Chinese students while simultaneously erecting barriers at every turn, and absurd remarks, such as ‘hoping to see more Chinese students coming to the US to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics’,” it said.

With reference to US border controls China Daily said in a commentary on 24 June: “The US actions far exceed the scope of normal law enforcement. The purpose is not to maintain the so-called national border security, but to hinder China’s technological development.”

It added: “For decades, Washington regarded well-educated Chinese youths as a key group that it wanted to influence in the hope that not only would the US benefit from China’s brain drain but, more importantly, it could cultivate a pro-US stance among the elites of Chinese society.

“Now, the US has done a 180-degree turn in its China policy and its politicised law-enforcement actions target this same group of people.”

China Daily has quoted sources saying such practices will only give rise to a serious “chilling effect” inside and outside the US, poison the public opinion environment for China-US relations, and impede mutual visits and exchange of talent between the two countries.