US economy

China warns of difficulties facing students in US


China has warned its students and scholars that they face growing difficulties in visiting the US, as the escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies spills into the broader bilateral relationship.

“Visa issuances for Chinese students studying in the United States have been restricted. The visa review period has been extended, the validity period has been shortened, and the refusal rate has increased,” the Chinese education ministry said on Monday, just ahead of the busy summer season for US visa applications.

“This has affected the Chinese students in the United States normally or successfully completing their studies in the United States.”

The ministry urged Chinese parents to make more careful assessments of the risks of planning US visits.

After negotiators failed to reach a trade deal in early May, both sides have escalated their tactics. The US has blacklisted Chinese telecoms company Huawei while the Chinese government responded with an “unreliable entities list” against companies that discriminate against Chinese firms.

Both countries assessed additional punitive tariffs against each others’ exports this month. To date, the tariffs have had minimal tangible effect on most citizens’ lives in either country, but a new climate of recriminations could change that.

A spokesperson for the US embassy in Beijing said more than 350,000 Chinese studied in the US in 2018. Application volumes for the top 30-50 US institutions are rising steadily.

“Parents who read this are really scared,” said Tomer Rothschild, co-founder of independent education consultancy Elite Scholars of China, who was deluged by parents seeking reassurance after the Ministry of Education’s warning on Monday. “Parents have been planning [to send their child abroad] for a long time.”

A State Department spokesperson said the US continued to welcome hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and scholars for “legitimate academic activities”, but reserved the right to reject or delay visa applications based on national security concerns.

“The US intelligence and law enforcement communities have identified an increasing number of instances in which foreign intelligence services co-opt academics, researchers, and others to conduct activities on behalf of foreign governments during the individual’s stay in the United States,” the spokesperson said.

“We cannot publicly discuss details of any specific case. However, when such activity is identified, the appropriate US agencies act to protect US interests and US persons using a variety of legal authorities under our rule of law.”

Despite the alarm generated by the warning, statistics show that the majority of Chinese students travel to the US smoothly.

According to statistics offered from the education ministry on Monday, among the more than 10,000 Chinese whose studies in the US were sponsored by the Chinese government in 2018, 331 people were unable to do so because of a visa issue.

In the first quarter of this year, 182 people out of the 1,353 sponsored by the government had an unresolvable visa issue.

That compares with over 100,000 Chinese students enrolled in US universities in 2018.

The warning comes after Washington rescinded 10-year visas held by some prominent Chinese scholars, and urged US universities to guard their laboratories more firmly against Chinese students trying to steal technology.

But even China hawks have been reluctant to block Chinese student visas more broadly because of the importance of Chinese students to US university budgets.

The warning plays into the feeling among some young Chinese that America is turning against them.

“Studying abroad is a dream. For some people today, the American visa process has become like a needle in their hearts,” DeepTech, a Chinese news service affiliated with MIT Technology Review, wrote on Monday, in a report on a Chinese student waiting six months for a US visa.

Mindful of the sentiment, Chinese president Xi Jinping positioned himself as a defender of Chinese students abroad in a speech to the Belt and Road conference in Beijing in late April.

“We also hope that every country in the world could create a good environment for investments, to fairly treat Chinese companies, Chinese overseas students and scholars and create an equal and friendly environment for their activities of international co-operation,” he said.

Additional reporting by Courtney Weaver in Washington



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