President Trump has regularly cast Red China as the greatest geopolitical adversary facing the United States. So, why is he preparing to allow its rising intellectuals to continue attending American universities?
On Wednesday, Trump announced a supposed breakthrough with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials on a new trade deal with the East Asian power. While scant on details, this new framework, according to the president, will include the reauthorization of U.S. student visas to Chinese nationals seeking to study at American colleges — a policy Trump claimed “has always been good with me!”
The president reiterated his support for allowing Chinese students to study in the U.S. during a press conference the following day. When asked by The Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese about whether he is “still worried about the national security issues with Chinese students in the U.S.,” the president acknowledged the potential risks but argued that allowing them to attend American colleges is “good for our country.”
“Look, I’ve always been in favor of students coming in from other countries. That includes China,” Trump said. “Does it mean that you have to watch people? Yeah, you have to watch students but you have to watch other people also. I’ve always been strongly in favor of it. I think it’s a great thing. … It’s good for our schools, I think it’s good for our country. I’m also in favor of having them stay. I’ve been in favor of letting them stay.”
The remarks signify an alarming reversal of the administration’s stance on the issue as announced a few weeks prior. On May 29, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a longtime CCP hawk — revealed that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security would begin “aggressively” revoking visas from Chinese students studying at American universities, “including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce later expanded upon the announcement when asked about it during a press conference later that day. In no uncertain terms, she said the Trump administration “will not tolerate the CCP’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.”
[RELATED: House Republicans Move To Block Chinese Nationals From Obtaining U.S. Student Visas]
While it’s certainly possible the president views the issue of student visas as nothing more than a bargaining tool designed to pressure Beijing into negotiating a new trade deal, the seemingly temporary policy shift actually represents a long overdue course correction on how Washington confronts the CCPs’ open hostility toward the United States.
For years, the Chinese government has exploited America’s student visa program to boost its prospects of becoming a regional and global superpower.
A 2019 Federal Bureau of Investigations report acknowledged that “while the vast majority of students and researchers from China are in the United States for legitimate academic reasons … the Chinese government uses some Chinese students — mostly post-graduate students and post -doctorate researchers studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — and professors to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property.”
“These Chinese scholars,” the analysis noted, “may serve as collectors — wittingly or unwittingly — of economic, scientific, and technological intelligence from U.S. institutions to ultimately benefit Chinese academic institutions and businesses.”
The report’s warnings echo concerns espoused by Miles Yu, a Chinese-born scholar who previously served as a China policy adviser during the first Trump administration. Writing at the Hoover Institution shortly after the 2024 election, Yu noted how “[m]any students hail from CCP-controlled institutions, including China’s top military and defense universities,” and that, “While some come in search of a brighter future, others arrive with mandates from the CCP, engaging in intellectual property theft or espionage, a pattern that has led to multiple FBI warnings and high-profile arrests.”
In recent years, federal authorities have detained numerous Chinese international students studying in the U.S. over alleged espionage and other actions that seemingly attempt to benefit the CCP.
Within the past few weeks alone, federal authorities arrested two Chinese nationals connected to the University of Michigan over alleged attempts to smuggle potentially harmful biological materials into the United States. According to The Detroit News, one of the individuals is “a UM scholar from China [detained] on charges she tried to smuggle a biological pathogen into the U.S., characterized as a potential agricultural terrorism weapon that can be used for targeting food crops.”
None of this is to suggest that every single Chinese student studying in the United States is a willing accomplice of the CCP. If anything, Chinese citizens are the primary victims of the CCP’s brutality and authoritarian tactics.
But the national security risks associated with permitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals to attend American universities every year are too great. And that is especially true when considering China’s national security laws require all Chinese citizens and organizations to “support, assist, and cooperate” with so-called “national intelligence efforts” and give the state the power to demand “relevant organs, organizations, and citizens provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.”
As Federalist Senior Contributor Ben Weingarten previously noted in these pages, “American institutions do not exist for the benefit of the world, but for our country,” and “Communist China does not hold an inalienable right to send its students here, especially given the lack of reciprocity.”
Regardless of his personal feelings on the subject, Trump must place American national security interests first. If he and his administration truly view Red China as the looming threat to the United States that it is, then cutting off a key source of Beijing’s espionage and intelligence gathering efforts is a good place to start.