TAIPEI: Beijing on Thursday (Mar 20) demanded protections for Chinese students in the US after a congressional panel asked six American universities to hand over a large amount of detailed information on their Chinese students, citing national security concerns.

A letter sent to the universities, including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, alleged that the Chinese government was embedding researchers in top American institutions to gain direct access to sensitive technologies.

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Chinese students account for about one-quarter of all international students in the US and that their activities have promoted “the economic prosperity and technological development of the US”.

“This is in the interest of both parties,” Mao told reporters at a daily briefing. “We urge the US to stop overstretching the concept of national security, effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students, and not impose discriminatory restrictive measures on Chinese students.”

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Her remarks came a day after John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, sent a letter to six universities requesting information on Chinese students enrolled in advanced science and technology programmes. He accused the institutions of putting American research at risk in exchange for financial incentives.

The colleges named in Moolenaar’s letter were Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Southern California.

“The Chinese Communist Party has established a well-documented, systematic pipeline to embed researchers in leading US institutions, providing them direct exposure to sensitive technologies with dual-use military applications,” Moolenaar wrote in a letter to Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon University.

“America’s student visa system has become a Trojan horse for Beijing, providing unrestricted access to our top research institutions and posing a direct threat to our national security,” it added.

“If left unaddressed, this trend will continue to displace American talent, compromise research integrity, and fuel China’s technological ambitions at our expense.”

The letter requested information including the Chinese students’ sources of funding, the types of research they are involved in, what schools they previously attended, and “a country-by-country breakdown of applicants, admittances, and enrolments at your university”.

Most Chinese students enrolled in US undergraduate programmes pay full tuition, making them an important source of funding for many universities. Many of the students do not remain in the US after university graduation but return to China, where they hope a US degree will land them a good job.

But foreign science and engineering doctorate recipients, including those from China, are more likely to stay in the US for their postdoc or employment, according to the National Science Foundation.

LAWMAKERS SEEK TO BLOCK CHINESE STUDENT VISAS

Last week, a Republican lawmaker introduced a Bill seeking to ban Chinese students from studying in US schools.

Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia on Mar 14 introduced the Bill that could bar Chinese nationals from receiving visas that allow foreigners to travel to the US to study or participate in exchange visitor programmes. Five other Republicans co-sponsored the measure.

By granting Chinese nationals such visas, the US has “invited” China’s Communist Party “to spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security”, Moore said in a statement.

“It’s time we turn off the spigot and immediately ban all student visas going to Chinese nationals.”

The measure is unlikely to pass, and has drawn criticism from organisations and scholars over concerns that hostile policies and rhetoric toward Chinese students could hurt US interests.

“No policy should target individuals solely on the basis of their national origin,” Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators, said in a statement.

“Making international students – the most vetted and tracked non-immigrants in the United States – a scapegoat for xenophobic and anti-Chinese sentiment is misguided and antithetical to our national interest,” Aw said.

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China “expresses strong concern and firmly opposes such practices”. He said education exchange and cooperation have long served as a pillar for the stable development of China-US relations.

The Asian American Scholars Forum said such legislation would harm the talent pipeline of Asian American scientists, scholars and researchers, undermining US leadership in science and innovation.

Despite the Bill’s slim chance of getting approved, Yangyang Cheng, a research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the Bill “should be seen as part of a broader effort to restrict academic freedom and hurt higher education in this country, to control what can be taught, which research projects can be pursued, and who have access to the classrooms and laboratories”.

In the 2023 to 2024 school year, more than 277,000 Chinese students were studying in US universities, or a quarter of the total number of international students, according to an annual report on international students from the Institute of International Education.

The number of Chinese students in the US, however, has been declining for years. Last year, China lost its status to India as the top feeder country of international students.

In 2023, Florida passed a law prohibiting state universities from hiring students from China and six other countries for graduate assistant and postdoc positions, and it has been challenged in court.

Several US universities have ended academic partnerships with Chinese schools amid mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers over national security concerns.

Reactions on China’s social media to the new proposed legislation were varied. Some who said they had recently received offers from American schools expressed concerns, some dismissed it as “a political show”, and some called it “another Chinese Exclusion Act”.