The Trump administration’s pledge to revoke the student visas of Chinese students in the United States could inadvertently be a boon for China, which has long been eager to woo back top talent to advance its tech and AI sectors.
In its crusade against American universities, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the Trump administration would “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese international students, including “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] or studying in critical fields.” The administration will also intensify scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong, Rubio said.
Beijing has for decades strived to develop its own research and talent pipelines—ambitions that may now also be boosted by the Trump administration’s continued threats and ongoing visa uncertainty. Roughly one-quarter of all international students in the United States come from China, which until recently sent more students to America than any other nation.
“China has wanted to hold onto the talent for a long time, and that’s one of the big reasons why they expanded their higher-education sector so rapidly in the early 2000s,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. Between 1999 and 2010, college enrollment in China skyrocketed from 1 million to 8 million students—an enormous surge that reflects China’s bid to keep more students in the country and establish itself as a tech and AI hub, Khanna said.
Today, China remains the top source of foreign undergraduate students and second-biggest supplier of graduate students in the United States. But Chinese enrollment in U.S. universities has steadily dropped since 2019, and in the 2023-2024 school year, New Delhi for the first time surpassed Beijing as a top source of students.
In justifying its policy moves, the Trump administration has accused the Chinese government of exploiting U.S. universities and stealing intellectual property and technology, building on long-running concerns about Chinese espionage that were also rife during the first Trump administration and Biden administration. Former President Joe Biden, for instance, maintained a Trump-era ban on graduate students in STEM fields from Chinese universities with military ties.
The United States “will not tolerate the [Chinese Communist Party’s] exploitation of U.S. universities or theft of U.S. research intellectual property or technologies to grow its military power, conduct intelligence collection or repress voices of opposition,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said last week.
A small number of Chinese students have indeed been charged with espionage, as FP’s James Palmer explained in the China Brief newsletter last week. But those cases range “from firm to shaky,” he wrote, and “the total number of instances is a trickle compared to the flood of Chinese students.”
The Trump administration has so far offered scant information on how exactly its visa revocations would work. On Sunday, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said that since the policy appears to be targeting all foreign students of Chinese origin—and not just individuals “engaged in nefarious activities” or “deeply connected to the CCP”—the effort is “terribly misguided and it appears prejudicial and discriminatory.”
Beijing is “cheering for this policy,” Krishnamoorthi added in his interview with CBS on Sunday. “They want these people back. They want the scientists and the entrepreneurs and the engineers who can come and help their economy. And so we are probably helping them, as well as other countries, more than helping ourselves with this policy.”
Chinese state media, for its part, has already seized on the news. “Chinese international students have innocently become political targets for Washington,” one Global Times editorial declared. “This is Washington implementing discriminatory collective restrictions against Chinese students under the unfounded guise of ‘national security.’”
If future cohorts of Chinese students do turn away from the United States, either because of the Trump administration’s visa revocations or as a result of the broader uncertainty, experts warn that U.S. research innovation and the American economy could suffer.
“America has amassed 25% of global GDP with 4% of the world population, in part, by drawing talent from around the world,” Ryan Hass, the director of the Brookings Institution’s China Center, said in an email to Foreign Policy. “America cuts itself off from global talent at its own peril.”
At the same time, a potential breakdown in research and educational ties would hamstring Beijing’s own research and pipeline ambitions as well. China and the United States are one of the highest collaborators in cross-border patenting, Khanna said, and the erosion of such collaboration would hurt both countries. Beijing also risks losing a stream of U.S.-educated talent that has helped build out the country’s university infrastructure and innovation sector, he said.
With fraught trade talks underway between Beijing and Washington, Hass said that the White House’s revocation announcement could heighten tensions between the two countries.
“China’s leaders will channel anger about the visa decision toward President Trump and will stoke nationalism in the process,” Hass said. “This will push any negotiated outcome on Trump’s priorities further away, rather than pulling the decision horizon closer.”