US House chair asks American universities to reveal info on their Chinese nationals

The chair of a US House committee on Wednesday sent letters to six American universities, including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, requesting information about their policies on Chinese nationals, in the latest congressional attempt to curb the flow of Chinese students to the US over national security concerns.

The letters asked the universities’ presidents to provide detailed information about their entire Chinese student populations by April 1, including the names of the universities the students previously attended, their sources of tuition, and the types of research and university programmes they participate in.

“The Chinese Communist Party has established a well-documented, systematic pipeline to embed researchers in leading US institutions, providing them direct exposure to sensitive technologies with dual-use military applications,” said John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, on Wednesday.

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“America’s student visa system has become a Trojan horse for Beijing,” Moolenaar added. “If left unaddressed, this trend will continue to displace American talent, compromise research integrity and fuel China’s technological ambitions at our expense.”

The letters further asked about the universities’ practices regarding Chinese nationals studying “STEM” fields like quantum computing plus faculty ties to China.

The six targeted schools also included Purdue University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California and are among America’s most active research universities, hosting significant numbers of Chinese students.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for instance, China was the top origin country for both the school’s international student and scholar populations in the fall of 2022.

US government interest in Chinese students has picked up in recent days, reflecting long-standing concerns that they may help Beijing circumvent export controls and other national security laws.

The attention has heaped fresh pressure on academic partnerships set up to share information and break down barriers between the US and China.

Last week, Republicans in the House and Senate introduced a bill to ban all Chinese nationals from obtaining student visas, eliciting outrage from Democratic lawmakers and Asian-American groups.

Previously, letters sent by Moolenaar’s committee led several US universities to announce they were terminating partnerships with Chinese institutions.

Those have included research giants like the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, as well as less research-focused institutions like Oakland University in Michigan and Alfred University in New York.

Scrutiny from the committee and other congressional bodies has largely focused on graduate students and partnerships in STEM. Wednesday’s letters were no exception.

At present, Chinese citizens make up the second-largest group of foreign students in the US, after Indian nationals.

According to the New York-based Institute of International Education, 277,398 Chinese studied in the US during the 2023-24 academic year, with 50.4 per cent of them taking up STEM subjects.

A 2022 report published by Georgetown University’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology found that Chinese and Indians combined make up nearly half of the foreign STEM students who stay in the US after graduation.

In February 2017, about 90 per cent of Chinese nationals who completed STEM PhD programmes in the US between 2000 and 2015 were still living stateside, compared to 66 per cent of graduates from other countries, the report stated.

In 2020, during his first administration, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation that led to the cancellation of more than 1,000 visas for Chinese nationals deemed “high-risk graduate students and research scholars”.