Restrictions and Reciprocity: U.S.-China Tensions in Academia

On September 2^nd, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a new series of restrictions against Chinese diplomats. Under these restrictions, Senior Chinese diplomats will be required to get prior State Department approval before visiting U.S. university campuses, meeting with local officials, or holding events larger than 50 people outside of embassy grounds.

Pompeo told a news briefing that the move was “simply demanding reciprocity”, based on the claim that American diplomats face undue bureaucratic barriers in China. “Access for our diplomats in China should be reflective of the access that Chinese diplomats in the United States have, and today’s steps will move us substantially in that direction,” he said.

It’s not the first time the word “reciprocity” has been used as a justification for limitations on Chinese access to U.S. universities—a 2019 U.S. Senate Report titled “China’s Impact on the U.S. Education System” cited the word as reasoning for closing China’s Confucius Institutes in the U.S. over ten times. Confucius Institutes, which were officially designed to be international institutions to promote Chinese language and culture, have been controversial for a number of years, primarily due to the proximity of their operations to the Chinese government. Hearings to address Confucius Institutes were held in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as 2012, where politicians like Representative Dana Rohrabcher claimed the institutions were efforts by China to “penetrate both private media and public education to spread its state propaganda”.

As U.S.-China relations have worsened, so too has the scrutiny that Confucius Institutes have faced. A 2018 defense bill restricted Department of Defense language program funding for U.S. institutions housing a Confucius Institute, putting more pressure on the institutions to close. Similar campaigns, like the previously mentioned 2019 Senate Report and efforts by the U.S. intelligence community, have further pushed for institute closings. These efforts have been largely effective. In 2017, there were 103 counted Confucius Institutes operating in the United States. By September 7^th, 2020, there were only 67, with five more slated to close within the coming months. Mike Pompeo said in early September that he was hopeful that all Confucius Institutes in the U.S. would be shut down by the end of the year.

In addition to facing suspicion for housing Confucius Institutes, U.S. universities have also begun to face scrutiny for something much more commonplace—hosting Chinese international students at all.

In 2019, the FBI released a report titled “China: The Risk to Academia”.  The report encouraged U.S. academic institutions to exhibit caution about accepting students from China, especially post-graduate students and researchers studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The report claims that these students, and even some professors, are used by the Chinese government “as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property.” After releasing the report, the FBI visited numerous universities to continue to push for scrutiny.

A handful of espionage lawsuits and arrests have followed. In December 2019, a Chinese researcher was caught attempting to smuggle 21 vials of biological research back to China in his flight luggage, and has been detained ever since. In January, Dr. Charles Lieber, a chemical biology professor at Harvard University, was arrested for making a false claim about his involvement with a program at the Wuhan University of Technology. In late August, a Chinese researcher at the University of Kansas was indicted for fraud due to failing to disclose his employment to a Chinese university. Yanqing Ye, a former student at Boston University, is now on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for failing to disclose her status as a People’s Liberation Army Lieutenant while studying in the United States. Similarly, Juan Tang, a former researcher at UC Davis, was arrested in late July for visa fraud and failing to disclose her connection to the PLA.

Cases like these have pushed espionage to the forefront of the tension between the United States and China. The U.S.’s unexpected forced closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston in late July was followed with the claim that diplomats at the consulate had engaged in economic espionage and attempted theft of scientific research. China firmly denied these claims and quickly retaliated, ordering the U.S. to close the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.

Recently, student visas have also begun to play a role in the tension. In May, Trump issued a proclamation titled “Proclamation on the Suspension of Entry as Nonimmigrants of Certain Students and Researchers from the People’s Republic of China”. It prohibits entry into the U.S. for any post-undergraduate PRC national seeking an F or J visa (study or research visas) if they have in any way been connected with the Chinese military, an institution with ties to the Chinese military, or “support the PRC’s ‘military-civil fusion strategy’”.

Even more recently on September 9^th, President Trump pushed this one step further—expelling and revoking the visas for more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and research scholars found to be “high risk”. The U.S. has maintained that this visa policy is a necessary measure to contribute to “an improved, open, and transparent environment in which U.S. and Chinese scholars can engage with greater trust”, and will only affect a “small subset” of international Chinese students.

It is true that the 1,000 revoked visas pale in comparison to the 369,548 estimated Chinese international students studying in the U.S. during the 2018-2019 academic year alone. China has been the largest source of international students to the U.S. for ten consecutive years, and Chinese students and professors have made important contributions in academic institutions in every corner of the country.

Yet while the U.S. has benefitted greatly from the contributions of these many scholars, China has also benefitted from the ability to send students to the United States—and similar to Pompeo’s idea of reciprocity, has often offered little in return. Despite their best efforts, the United States has never been allowed to set up cultural centers reminiscent of Confucius Institutes in China, and it is difficult for China to tit-for-tat retaliate to these student visa restrictions considering the imbalance of student flows between the two countries. Perhaps that is the justification in the U.S. for the crackdown on academia—the field is seen as both potentially dangerous and not reciprocated, with legitimate evidence for both claims. This helps create that idea that the U.S. has more to gain than lose from restricting Chinese access to universities.

However, in the long run, that claim will likely prove too simplistic. As two global economic powers, China and the United States have much to gain from working together, especially in the “dangerous” fields such as science, technology, or medicine.  The newfound fear of Chinese espionage is also still yet poorly defined, often spreading to affect unrelated ethnic Chinese communities in the United States, and could raise civil rights concerns for Chinese Americans moving forward. American universities also greatly benefit from having Chinese students, who contribute a significant amount of tuition income and make meaningful scholarly contributions at U.S. institutions in all fields.

Traditionally, the exchange of scholars and scholarly ideas has been a foundational practice in the diplomatic relations between two countries. To sever this tie now would further destabilize the U.S.-China relationship and make it that much harder to reconcile in the future. Yet with constantly increasing restrictions, the closing of cultural institutions, and lawsuits and fears over espionage abound, it is clear that the field of academia is quickly becoming the next unexpected battleground for U.S.-China relations.