Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”
He added that the State Department was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.
The move was certain to send ripples of anxiety across university campuses in the United States and was likely to lead to reprisal from China, the country of origin for the second-largest group of international students in the United States.
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{snip} The lack of detail on the scope of the directive will no doubt fuel worries among the roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, as well as professors and university administrators who depend on their research skills and financial support.
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It is unclear how quickly the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will move to cancel the visas of affected students, or whether China will now take retaliatory actions on the relatively fewer number of American students in the country and move to expel some of them.
Until now, family members of most Chinese Communist Party officials could study at American universities. Many top party officials sent children to American universities in recent decades. Mr. Xi sent his daughter, Xi Mingze, to attend Harvard under a pseudonym. Harvard administrators and a few professors knew who she was before her graduation in 2014.
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In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country. It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.
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