Visa exemption for Chinese visitors extended 5 years
The Visa Liberalisation Plan for Chinese visitors has been extended for another five years, as the initiative has shown immediate positive impact on the country's economy, said Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail.
He said the decision to extend was part of a series of memoranda of understanding and documents signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent state visit to Malaysia, covering various sectors of cooperation.
Among them was a joint visa exemption agreement for...
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The Star
3 hours ago
- The Star
Chinese spies at Stanford? US tightens visa policies over espionage fears
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
The Star
4 hours ago
- The Star
Hong Kong's still ‘over' but Stephen Roach says city a surprise trade war winner
American economist Stephen Roach has said that Hong Kong has benefited from the US-China trade war despite last year having declared the city to be 'over', even as he claimed that other aspects of the financial hub had worsened. The former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman sparked debate last year after he penned an opinion piece which argued, in part, that Hong Kong would be caught in the 'crossfire' of the worsening US-China rivalry. 'The word caught is the word that, if I had to write the piece again, I would probably change, because I think, ironically, Hong Kong has benefited from the crossfire between the US and China,' he told the Post in a recent interview. Despite worsening ties between the two superpowers since US President Donald Trump began levying his so-called reciprocal tariffs on China and the rest of the world, Hong Kong's stock market has seen solid gains. The benchmark Hang Seng Index is up by around 50 per cent since Roach made his original claim, while Hong Kong has rocketed to the top of the global fundraising table following a string of high-profile initial public offerings last month, including from mainland Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology. Roach, who is now a faculty member at Yale University, said the 'sell America' trade had become a 'global mantra' and Hong Kong was a beneficiary. But asked whether he felt his initial assessment of the city being 'over' was premature, he noted he would say the same again. 'No economy or city state is over ... but this image of a dynamic, powerful system as part of the 'one country, two systems' model, I think that's just as close to being over today as it was when I originally wrote the piece,' he said, referring to the city's governing principle. 'The governance story is still, I think, very much working against this notion of Hong Kong as a free, independent, autonomous city state. If anything, it's gotten worse.' Roach added that the strong performance of the city's stock market had 'instilled sort of a new swagger in Hong Kong bordering on denial'. He said there were 'questions that could be raised' about the city's independent rule of law, pointing to the departure of foreign non-permanent judges. He also raised concerns about the fast-tracking of the domestic national security law last year and what he described as continuing efforts to 'quash dissent'. While the Hong Kong government had 'risen to the challenge' to demonstrate to the world that the city should be considered 'special', American investors in particular had developed an 'unwillingness' to distinguish it from the rest of China, he said. 'Where I've come out, reluctantly, is that as great a city as Hong Kong is, it's just another big Chinese city,' he said. 'I think it's increasingly a one country, one system model with a solid financial capital raising infrastructure embedded in Hong Kong.' Executive Council convenor Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, who previously hit back at Roach over his 'Hong Kong is over' remarks, maintained that the American economist did not understand the city. She said the 'pessimistic views' Roach expressed last year 'were primarily based on the Hong Kong stock market's poor performance'. 'He overlooked China's strength in technological innovations and Hong Kong's unique advantages based on its separate systems. We are the only part of China that can invest, manage and provide trading platforms for digital assets.' She cited the city's recently passed law on stablecoins, which she said would help Hong Kong be the country's 'testing ground' for cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency token that maintain a fixed value by being pegged to a reference asset, typically fiat currencies such as the US dollar. The law, which was passed last month and is set to take effect later this year, establishes a regulatory regime for stablecoins, paving the way for issuers to obtain licences and sell the digital assets to the public. 'Despite ongoing US-China tensions, Hong Kong will continue to have an important role to play in building bridges between China and the West,' Ip said. - SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
The Star
6 hours ago
- The Star
New partnership to enhance vocational education, training in Laos
A representative from the Lao School of Business and Commerce (left) and a representative from the LFND display the signed agreement in Vientiane last week. VIENTIANE: Young people from ethnic communities and families of Lao Front for National Development's (LFND) staff will have greater access to free vocational and language education under new cooperation agreements aimed at strengthening human resources and promoting inclusive development. The Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) between the Research and Training Centre of the Central (LFND) and the Lao School of Business and Commerce (LSBC) and the Ethnic Technical and Vocational College was signed in Vientiane last week. The agreements outline long-term collaboration in scholarship provision, curriculum development, and skills training. Under the MoC with LSBC, the school will offer 95 full scholarships each year for a Higher Diploma in Business Administration. Of these, five are reserved for children of LFND central staff, while 90 are allocated to Grade 7 students from Vientiane and 17 provinces. LSBC will waive tuition fees for all recipients during the three-year programme. The school will also grant 100 percent tuition-free English language training to LFND employees and a 50 percent fee reduction for their spouses and children. It will provide six-monthly and annual reports to the LFND on student performance and academic progress. Meanwhile, the cooperation with the Ethnic Technical and Vocational College targets ethnic high school graduates, offering scholarships in Chinese-language higher education programmes. The college will award three scholarships per year for the first five years and six per year for the following 12 years, all with full tuition exemptions. To support this initiative, the LFND will assist in developing the college's campus in Viengkeo village, Xaythany district, coordinate with relevant authorities, and contribute political education content to the curriculum. Two LFND staff will be assigned to the college, and scholarship recipients' progress will be monitored regularly. Both colleges will work with the LFND to introduce short-term training courses in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean for staff, students, and the public. They also plan to carry out joint research to improve educational quality and better align with labour market needs. The MoC with LSBC is valid from 2025 to 2030, while the agreement with the Ethnic Technical and Vocational College will run from 2025 to 2040. These partnerships mark a significant step in expanding education opportunities and improving workforce readiness for communities across Laos. - Vientiane Times/ANN
