‘They make people too scared': Chinese students reckon with US visa bans

Boston Globe

29-05-2025

He sighed. Since it was too late to apply elsewhere for his undergraduate years, 'I can only brace myself,' said Li, who plans to study applied mathematics. But, 'in the future, if I can avoid going to the United States to study, I will. They make people too scared.'
The scene outside the embassy captured the complicated feelings many Chinese students have toward studying in the United States. Hundreds of thousands still go each year, lured by the promise of a world-class education. Some also have deep admiration for America's professed values of openness and diversity.
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But they must reckon with the fact — made clearer by the Trump administration every day — that many in the United States may not share that admiration.
Even before the announcement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the United States would begin revoking student visas, Chinese students and their families were uncertain about their prospects for studying in America. Two days earlier, Rubio had ordered a pause on new interviews for student and exchange visas.
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Chinese students have been singled out before. In 2020, during his first term, President Trump issued a proclamation banning students from certain Chinese universities from graduate study in the United States, alleging that those universities had ties to China's military. The parameters of that proclamation, which is still in effect, were vague, but it has been used mostly to deny visas to people in fields such as the physical sciences, engineering and computer science, according to researchers.
But the effect of the earlier measure was relatively limited, resulting in the revocations or denials of about 3,000 visas between 2020 and 2021, according to U.S. government data.
It is unclear what the scope of the new revocations will be, but they are likely to be much more far-reaching. Rubio's order said only that they would include 'those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party' or 'studying in critical fields.'
As Chinese students were digesting the announcement, the response from Chinese officials was relatively muted.
Asked at a regularly scheduled news conference on Thursday about the move, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry said that the United States was 'using ideology and national security as an excuse' to harm Chinese students.
'This politically discriminatory practice by the US side exposes the lie of the so-called 'freedom and openness' that the US has always advertised,' the spokeswoman, Mao Ning said, adding that China had communicated its displeasure to the Americans.
In other disputes with the United States, the Chinese government has often been quick to retaliate —imposing reciprocal tariffs on the United States, for example, or expelling American journalists after Trump ejected Chinese ones during his first term.
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But on the question of international students, China has little leverage. In 2024, there were only about 800 American students in China, a number that reflects many Americans' lingering fears of visiting China, especially after its three years of lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. (In 2019, there were around 11,000 American students.)
Beijing would probably be reluctant to use those remaining students as bargaining chips, said Denis Simon, the former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, a partnership between Duke University and Wuhan University. China has made clear that it wants to recruit more American students to burnish its international image; China's leader, Xi Jinping, has said that he wants 50,000 young Americans to study in China in the coming years.
Instead, Simon said, China could retaliate in unrelated ways, such as reducing cooperation with the United States on controlling the flow of fentanyl, or withholding rare earths exports.
Or perhaps, Chinese officials might see the Trump administration's measures as so self-defeating that they feel little need to respond, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Revocations would be likely to make more Chinese students choose other countries, such as Singapore or the United Kingdom, or to stay at home to study.
'Even if China doesn't do anything, it would make their image, their reputation, their soft-power initiatives, more appealing,' Huang said.
Until the 2023-24 school year, Chinese students were by far the most populous group of international students in the United States, contributing billions of dollars each year to the US economy and solidifying the country's reputation as a magnet for global talent. Many of those students, especially at the graduate level, are in STEM fields.
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Though the number of Chinese students has begun to decline in recent years, amid heightened US-China geopolitical tensions, interest has remained strong. There were around 277,000 Chinese international students in the United States in the 2023-24 term, according to government data. In fact, applications from China for undergraduate study grew 6% this year, according to the Common App.
'For STEM, you should definitely go to the United States, because STEM is the most developed there,' said a woman at the embassy who gave only her surname, Fan. She said she had just been approved for a visa to study computer engineering at a master's program in Seattle.
Fan said she was not worried about the Trump administration's various assaults on American universities, and on Chinese and other international students. She pointed to the long line of other visa applicants as proof that others were still hopeful, too. 'I think Trump is just a lot of noise, but not much action,' she said.
Others were less optimistic. Jason Wei had just left the embassy without being approved to return to his master's program in electrical engineering in New York, where he has one semester left. The embassy officer had asked him to provide more information, including his previous passport, he said.
Wei said he had expected the delay, as there had been a similar one when he first applied for the visa a year earlier. (He had to reapply now because he had returned to China for a summer internship.) He suspected it was related to his field of study.
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'It's up to fate,' he said. 'I can't do anything about it.'