Emma Bussey recently reported for Fox News that “Donald Trump said 600,000 Chinese students would be allowed into the U.S. to study at colleges amid ongoing trade talks with China.” She noted that President Trump told reporters “I hear so many stories that we’re not going to allow their students[.] We’re going to allow their students to come in. It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important.”
But there are already too many students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the U.S. — 277,398 in the 2023/24 academic year, totaling fully one-quarter of the entire foreign student population, with over half studying in engineering, computer science, and other STEM fields. What is most troubling about the specter of a record-breaking 600,000 PRC students inundating our college campuses is that their presence here is a key component of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) plan to achieve military supremacy over the United States.
PRC President “Xi Jinping, has … [made] clear that overseas Chinese students and scholars are key to his plans to transform China into an innovative and militarily formidable world power.”
I have written in the Washington Examiner that PRC “officials openly proclaim that armed conflict with the United States is inevitable and have been assiduously pursuing the goal of military superiority over the U.S. to be able to prevail over us in a war”. A staff report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (ESRC), established by Congress to review the national security implications of trade and economic ties between the U.S. and the PRC, concluded that PRC President “Xi Jinping, has … [made] clear that overseas Chinese students and scholars are key to his plans to transform China into an innovative and militarily formidable world power.”
This is by no means a new threat. What my then-boss John Hostettler (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, said two decades ago is even more relevant today: “There is no nation that engages in surreptitious illegal technology acquisition for purposes of both commercial piracy and military advancement on a scale that approaches that of the People’s Republic of China.” Larry Wortzel, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, testified before that subcommittee that:
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Thousands of Chinese students and scientists were sent abroad by China over the years to pursue critical, civil and military dual-use technologies, and the practice still continues. Thus, the U.S. faces an organized program out of China that is designed to gather high technology information of military use.
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Chinese diplomatic missions abroad monitor the activities of their … students to cultivate informants, and before Chinese citizens get passports or travel permission, they are often interviewed by China’s intelligence security services and sensitized to intelligence collection requirements.
While not new, the threat has gotten far worse over the years, as the PRC has grown more sophisticated. The ESRC report concluded that “Since the 1990s, China’s government has built a sprawling ecosystem of structures, programs, and incentives to coopt and exploit Chinese students and scholars for the S&T [science and technology] they acquire abroad.” This ecosystem is designed “to leverage the resources of American universities to provide the technology and talent Beijing needs to win its national competition with the United States”.
How? As the report explained:
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This ecosystem sponsors promising Chinese students and scholars at U.S. and other foreign universities, incentivizes their return to China for the long term, and employs transnational organizations to channel S&T know-how from those remaining abroad back to mainland China.
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Many programs associated with Beijing’s S&T transfer ecosystem … contribute to China’s military-civil fusion strategy by collecting specific technologies and know-how that improve the capabilities of the … PLA … and advance the [CCP’s] goals. …
The ecosystem rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars: scholarships that send promising Chinese students and scholars overseas with a requirement to return, policies encouraging Chinese students and scholars to return to China in the long term, and policies enabling Chinese students and scholars who remain overseas to transfer knowledge and technology back to the Mainland.
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The first pillar uses government-run scholarship programs to fund Chinese students to study STEM fields at foreign universities in exchange for an obligation to return home immediately and complete a national service work requirement lasting several years.
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The second pillar offers robust incentives to Chinese students who are studying or working abroad to return to China at some point in the future.
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The third pillar uses a network of transnational technology transfer organizations to target Chinese students and scholars who have permanently settled in other countries. These transnational organizations are … tasked with mobilizing Chinese citizens and ethnic Chinese in pursuit of the Party’s goals. [They] incentivize Chinese students and scholars to contribute to China’s national rejuvenation through appeals to national pride, ethnic identity, or desire for financial reward.
Five years ago, President Trump recognized the threat from the PRC. In May 2000, he issued a proclamation suspending the entry into the U.S. of certain nationals of the PRC coming to study or conduct research at the graduate level. President Trump stated that:
The … PRC … is engaged in a wide ranging and heavily resourced campaign to acquire sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property, in part to bolster the modernization and capability of [the] PLA. The PRC’s acquisition of sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property to modernize its military is a threat to our Nation’s long-term economic vitality and the safety and security of the American people.
The PRC authorities use some Chinese students, mostly postgraduate students and post-doctorate researchers, to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property. Thus, students or researchers from the PRC studying or researching beyond the undergraduate level who are or have been associated with the PLA are at high risk of being exploited or co-opted by the PRC authorities and provide particular cause for concern.
And John Demers, assistant attorney general, National Security Division, in President Trump’s Justice Department, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2018 regarding the threat of economic espionage by the PRC:
[W]e cannot tolerate a nation that steals our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower. And this is just what China is doing to achieve its development goals[,] … pursuing [them] through malign behaviors that exploit features of a free-market economy and an open society like ours … using a variety of means, ranging from the facially legal to the illicit, including various forms of economic espionage … and other, less obvious tactics to advance its economic development at our expense.
From 2011-2018, more than 90 percent of the Department’s cases alleging economic espionage by or to benefit a state involve China, and more than two-thirds of the Department’s theft of trade secrets cases have had a nexus to China.
The United States did not always have so many foreign students from the PRC. As I have noted, as recently as 2008/09, they accounted for only 14.6 percent of all foreign students, in 1994/95 only 8.7 percent, and in 1984/85 only 3.0 percent. What has accounted for the dramatic increase? The ESRC report concluded that “This growth … was driven by several important [visa policy] changes during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, which reflected an assumption in U.S. policy that China would gradually liberalize as the result of increased engagement.” Unfortunately, the PRC has most assuredly not become more like us.
I have written in bewilderment in the Washington Examiner that “Believe it or not, we are engaging in a campaign of turbocharging the PRC’s war preparations. Crazy? Seemingly.” I have concluded that “It may be time to consider barring the entry of, or issuance of visas to, all students and exchange visitors from the PRC, or at least those who will be studying in STEM or other fields likely to give them access to information and research of value to the PLA.” At the very least, let’s not make the problem worse. We cannot tolerate this continuing PRC threat on our college campuses.
