Chinese spies at Stanford? US tightens visa policies over espionage fears

The Star

11 hours ago

Chinese spies at Stanford University. American and Chinese pawns for Beijing at Duke Kunshan. Chinese student scouts near a military site in Michigan.
These are some of the 'bombshell' allegations that have been fuelling online buzz and US government efforts to sever educational ties between the US and China in recent months.
A day after The Stanford Review – a student-run conservative newspaper – published a report on May 7 alleging that Beijing was conducting a 'widespread intelligence-gathering campaign' on campus, Senator Ashley Moody, Republican of Florida, cited the piece as evidence that Congress must pass her bill to prevent all Chinese citizens from obtaining US student visas.
Similarly, months after a Duke University student published an account of her experiences with Chinese media during a trip to China, two US representatives wrote to Duke's president seeking to shut down Duke Kunshan, the university's joint campus with Wuhan University in China, alleging that it was helping to facilitate Chinese propaganda and intellectual property theft.
And, months after claims that Chinese students were spying near a military site in Michigan, the University of Michigan – facing pressure from lawmakers – announced it would end its partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Capping this trend, the State Department announced last week it would 'aggressively' revoke visas of Chinese students, including those with 'connections' to China's Communist Party and in 'critical fields', citing Beijing's 'intelligence collection' and theft of US research.
Lawmakers and government officials involved say that US engagement with Chinese students and universities must be restricted to protect national security.
But US-based China scholars and education advocates call the risks overstated and often unsubstantiated, and the proposed responses disproportionate.
The cost, they say, of misjudging the balance between openness and protecting national security is high – putting not only America's ability to understand China, but also its capacity to innovate, at risk.
That risk has become all the more potent as US President Donald Trump's administration targets international students more broadly, from expanding the review of visa applicants' social media accounts to revoking Harvard University's authority to host them at all.
'I do not believe that the danger here is that students on campus are going to gain access to secrets or be a national security risk,' said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues, adding that open campuses offered little intelligence value.
Wilder, who previously worked at the CIA, said there was a conflation of worry about control by Beijing with the actual gathering of intelligence.
'There is a very real fear among Chinese students studying in the US that they are being monitored by other Chinese students on behalf of the Chinese embassy – but that doesn't mean those students are spies.'
Defining spying as 'the stealing of secrets that a foreign government does not want you to have', Wilder cautioned that an overly broad definition would lead to a wasting of resources.
'Chasing after students means missing the bigger, more dangerous targets,' he said, citing as an example of a higher priority the case of Su Bin, a Chinese businessman who pleaded guilty in 2016 to hacking the computer networks of major US military contractors.
China specialists have also questioned the strength of the evidence cited in some of the published allegations.
'The Stanford Review article relies heavily on anonymous sources and anecdotal experience, which could create serious problems for accurately assessing the nature of the risk,' said Rosie Levine, executive director of the US-China Education Trust, a Washington-based non-profit that facilitates academic exchanges.
And that, Levine said, could lead to blanket suspicion being cast upon all Chinese students based on their country of origin rather than any problematic behaviour.
'I fear that articles like this will put a target on the back of Chinese students who are genuinely in the United States to get a good education,' she said, arguing that targeting behaviours rather than specific nationalities or institutions might be more productive.
The Review article cited anonymous students and experts to claim the presence of spies at Stanford – without describing any concrete intelligence-gathering operation involving a current student or faculty member.
It cites one former visiting researcher from China – Chen Song – who was indicted by the Department of Justice in 2021 for concealing her affiliation with the People's Liberation Army. The case was ultimately dismissed, a fact the report did not mention.
Without directly criticising the article, some Stanford researchers and faculty warned that a more systematic collection of evidence was crucial to 'sound policy'. They also pushed for using spying-related terms more precisely.
'Espionage is a serious crime, and, while some cases will rise to that threshold, applying the label too broadly risks flawed prosecutions and confusing different aspects of research security,' said Larry Diamond, Matthew Pottinger and Matt Turpin in a letter to the Review. Pottinger and Turpin both worked in the White House during Trump's first term.
The Stanford Review did not respond to a request for comment.
China analysts were quick to outline the stakes of miscalibration.
'US academic institutions attract top talent globally, and many from China remain in the US and continue to make valuable contributions to research and development in their fields. This is a 'brain drain' from China that benefits the US,' said Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School.
Daum recalled the Justice Department's China Initiative, a controversial and deactivated programme begun in the first Trump administration, saying that in the name of protecting against economic espionage, its investigations focused more on individuals' connections to China rather than on criminal acts related to the transfer of intellectual property.
'Naturally, crimes should be investigated, and confidential materials in businesses and universities should be protected,' Daum said.
'There is no basis, however, for suspecting anyone based solely on their nationality, ethnicity, affiliations, or the affiliations of their affiliations – such as where they only attended a school that had military research ties unrelated to their own work.'
Levine said that, left unchecked, broad classifications would 'cast a net so wide that non-sensitive programmes that benefit Americans will be inadvertently affected'.
That has already happened in states across the country. Florida International University, for instance, in 2023 cancelled a two-decade-old hospitality programme with the Tianjin University of Commerce after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law restricting US-China partnerships.
Since the start of Trump's second term, efforts targeting US-China education exchanges based on sweeping criteria have picked up. Last month, the full House of Representatives passed a bill that incentivises US universities to cut partnerships with a broad group of universities in China.
Last week, the State Department declined to provide details on what areas of study or type of link to the Communist Party would make a Chinese citizen subject to greater visa scrutiny.
Washington has already set rules that prevent foreign students and scholars from gaining access to sensitive information on university campuses, such as 'export administration regulations' on certain advanced technologies.
And in 2020, the US government cancelled visas for graduate programme students from Chinese universities believed to have close research relationships with China's military.
For proponents of exchange, the benefits include deep country expertise that Wilder says has been instrumental to US policy on China for decades. While there were more than 11,000 American students in China as recently as 2019, the latest available estimate, from 2024, hovers around 1,000.
Experts say government oversight of US-China exchanges is often shaped by broad or inaccurate assumptions.
'American students are not as naive as the congressional committees seem to want to believe they are,' Wilder said, noting that they are often aware that they may be targets for Beijing's espionage or propaganda before heading to China.
Andrew Polk, founder of the Trivium China consultancy, noted that US scrutiny often hinged on whether an institution has ties to the Chinese Communist Party – but in China, 'everything is linked to the CCP'.
That ubiquity, he argued, makes such a standard too blunt to be meaningful.
Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said reports about Chinese intelligence gathering often 'make little effort to convey a sense of proportion, either in the risks or benefits of having Chinese students'.
The Stanford report, for instance, 'uses language like 'existential' without acknowledging that more than 90 per cent of Chinese-born doctoral students in STEM stay in the US ... And it assumes that the US can stay ahead if we prevent Chinese IP theft, whereas China is in the lead on many technologies', she said.
Ho-fung Hung, another professor at SAIS, said clear parameters should be established for research areas that are off-limits.
'Even at the height of the Cold War, US and USSR scientific and technological cooperation continued. But a clear boundary needs to be set,' he said.
'Without such boundary, universities are going to be cautious and reluctant to continue working with Chinese scholars and students in all fields,' he continued, adding that China could help the situation by 'rethinking, revising, or refining the law that obliges all individual citizens, companies and organisations to spy for the state'. - SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST