In the midst of a rare MAGA split with the Trump administration, a China policy expert has declared that Chinese students in American universities could constitute a major national security liability.
President Trump set off the split when he said in Tuesday’s cabinet meeting that, without Chinese students, “the college system would go to hell very quickly.” He continued, “And it wouldn’t be the top colleges, so it’d be colleges that struggle on the bottom. And you take out 300,000 or 600,000 students out of the system.”
Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, says the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the presence of Chinese nationals in our schools to “advance malign influence operations.” He continued:
They do this by re-appropriating basic and applied research in American universities, taking it over to China, and stealing American innovations, essentially. And they also will conduct espionage. They will silence Chinese students on American campuses and force them to either advance the CCP propaganda line or silence them. And that’s just unacceptable.
Trump has yet to back down on his declared support for Chinese student visas, though a White House official told Fox News on Thursday that “the 600K references two years’ worth of visas. It’s simply a continuation of existing policy.”
Sobolik said that, not only does the presence of huge numbers of Chinese nationalist impact our national security, it erodes the independence of the colleges and universities dependent upon them for tuition money. He said:
It’s not just STEM programs and security risks. It is not just what China’s government is doing on these campuses. It’s how universities are complicit in it because they need that money. It’s all about the bottom line for them, and American values suffer in the process.
For more, see Fox News.