The World Will Just Get Dumber
The world will just get dumber. On May 28, the U.S. State Department announced it would begin revoking visas for Chinese students. On June 5, Presidents Trump and Xi had a phone call, after which Trump backtracked on the threat. “Chinese students are coming no problem,” Trump said in the Oval Office, “It’s our honor to have them, frankly.” Yet, visas once placed under threat can be under threat again. The Sinophobia in Washington that facilitates such threats and the animosity between the MAGA movement and American universities, for whom visa threats are the larger target, are not new and will out last the tantrums of America’s split-second news cycles.
The vagueness of the original statement puts the future of any member of the second largest foreign student population on American university campuses at risk – even if that risk has abated for the moment. The U.S. government threatened to “aggressively revoke visas of Chinese students, including those to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” but, here’s the trick, not limited to these students. Given the CCP’s enormous membership, around 100 million, it is virtually impossible to live in China and not have a connection to the CCP depending on how “connection” is defined. However, by the strict wording of the statement, not even this was needed as justification. According to the statement, being Chinese was enough to get kicked out of the country.
As with most of the Trump administration’s policies toward China, this new threat was the logical next step in a mostly continuous position in Washington for the past decade. As the trade war dominates the news, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Biden administration had no problem maintaining its predecessor’s tariff policies. Nor, did the Biden administration act against the shuttering of U.S.-funded opportunities to study in China. (See here.)
Appeals to U.S. national security and America’s place in technological competition were made to combat the visa revocation threat, but they were mistaken. Yes, threatening all 277,000 Chinese students studying at American universities, most of whom pay increased tuition and indirectly subsidize American students, would cause vast economic damage to the American university system. But, that’s the point.
China is not the only enemy. For the Trump administration to realize it’s sometimes-stated goal of turning back the clock and restoring factory labor as the dominant mode of work in the United States, it needs to significantly reduce access to education. The loss of Chinese students alongside the stripping of U.S. government research grants for America’s top universities, many ranked among the best globally, will do just that.
The administration was lashing out at two enemies – one foreign, the other domestic. These enemies remain (and perhaps they need to remain for the MAGA project to keep up steam), which means attacks on both in the future can be expected. As top universities lose access to top students and funding, the world will just get dumber.
On the One Hand – China
The State Department’s threat follows a long line of restrictions on international education exchange, immigration, and Chinese national presence in the United States, dating back to the first Trump administration. Many of these policies were kept in place by the Biden administration.
In 2018, the Trump administration reportedly considered Stephen Miller’s proposal to ban all Chinese students from entering the United States. While this was not implemented, the State Department shortened the visa durations for those studying in ‘sensitive fields’ to one year from the previously standard five-year duration.
As a result, many Chinese students were forced to remain in the United States for an extended period during their studies, fearing that once they exit the United States, they could be denied a re-entry visa and be unable to complete the rest of their degree program. Many missed important family events and opportunities to attend international academic conferences. While not an explicit U.S. government policy, students thought the risk was too substantial and self-restricted their travels.
This anxiety proved very well-founded. Trump signed the Presidential Proclamation 10043 in May 2020, which prohibits Chinese national students associated with universities affiliated with the Chinese military or receiving funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) from receiving student and exchange scholar visas. Those who are already studying with F-1 visas would not be able to renew their visas once they expired, and many were denied re-entry even with a valid visa when they landed at an American airport.
The proclamation made it impossible for anyone, including people who studied in these universities at the undergraduate level and in the humanities and social sciences, to receive a student visa to attend university in the United States. While the Republican Senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, suggested that Chinese students should be allowed to come to America to “study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers” instead of “quantum computing,” Proclamation 10043 meant that any Chinese student who had links with the listed universities would not be able to come to America even just to read the Bard.
While many students hoped the Biden administration would rescind the policy, it did not. Many of those denied visas have had to subsequently re-apply to study at institutions outside the United States, contributing their skilled labor to non-U.S. technological advancement and financially weakening American universities.
Proclamation 10043 is a microcosm of how a blanket ban would look for all Chinese international students. It is Kafkaesque bureaucratic unreason: there is no case-by-case analysis, no evidentiary requirement for denials, and no recourse for those whose visas are denied. A class action lawsuit brought to a Federal District Court by those impacted by Proclamation 10043, Baryshnikov v. Mayorkas, was dismissed by the Federal Judge on the grounds that the Proclamation’s restrictions fall within the President’s authorities to suspend entry in order to protect the “interests of the United States.”
The restrictions escalated in December 2020, with a State Department policy to limit B1/B2 visitor visas for members of the CCP and their immediate family members to one month, single-entry, a dramatic reduction from the previously-established ten-year validity period for Chinese visitors to the United States. The Biden administration did not rescind the policy during its four years.
Just two months after Proclamation 10043, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future.” In the speech, Pompeo argued that the decades of engagement with China have failed to “induce change” in the way that America expected. Pompeo said that “China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings.” Later in the speech, however, he emphasized that,
Our approach can’t just be about getting tough. That’s unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.
This highlights the fundamental paradox in U.S. national security discourse pertaining to Chinese international students. On one hand, the U.S. government has to argue that the Chinese Communist Party does not represent all Chinese people, that the Chinese people in the abstract are “freedom-loving” and yearn to live in a liberal democracy for the “sweet appeal of freedom.” On the other hand, it targets Chinese students in the United States as threats to American national security for being a priori CCP agents. The difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue is only where they draw the line between ‘CCP agent’ and ‘freedom-loving Chinese person’ in specific cases of Chinese international students. Evidently, Proclamation 10043 is an instance of bipartisan consensus on that line; the recent threat to aggressively revoke visas from all Chinese students is one where there is no such consensus.
This is not to deny that the United States has legitimate interests in countering the CCP’s practice of transnational repression, protecting academic freedoms and freedom of speech on U.S. campuses when it comes to speech critical of the CCP. The essential question is how the U.S. government advances these interests. So far, much of the discourse has effectively been subsumed in national security terms, in which the values of free speech and civil liberties become a symbol for the superiority of ‘us’ compared to ‘them’—and in order to protect ‘us’, we must temporarily suspend some of these rights and liberties to ensure ‘they’ do not take over and permanently destroy our free society.
Eventually, this culminates in broad restrictions that make no distinction between the Chinese people and their government. In turn, this enables the Chinese government to strengthen its domestic narrative that the West, with America as the core, is inherently and immutably anti-China, and seeks to undermine the interests of the Chinese people. Mao Ning, spokeswoman of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responded to the U.S. policy, saying it “exposes the lie of the so-called ‘freedom and openness’ that the U.S. has always advertised.” She is not entirely wrong. The irony of the situation is that by returning to the cold war “dictatorship vs democracy” binary in foreign policy analysis, the United States is gradually securitizing itself out of liberal democracy.
China is already capitalizing on America’s closing doors. In 2023, Xi announced a plan to invite 50,000 young Americans to China for study and exchange in the next five years. American students were offered the opportunity to travel to China for free in “promotional tours” which aim to present a positive image of China and its government. China has also substantially reduced barriers for ordinary U.S. visitors to China. The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. announced in January 2024 that tourist visa applicants were no longer required to provide proof of round-trip flights, itinerary or hotel confirmations.
The heavily advertised and promoted ‘144-hour visa-free transit’ policy, which enabled Americans and nationals of 53 other countries to visit China for six days in transit, was expanded to 10 days in stay duration, with an expanded area of stay in December 2024. China has also waived visa requirements for travelers from most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand for visits up to a month.
With increasing political and economic pressures on U.S. universities, Beijing has also had success in recruiting American scientists and researchers to Chinese universities. A number of universities based in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, have extended unconditional transfer offers to Harvard’s international students amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard and international students more generally. While it is unclear how many Harvard students will take up the offer, it is certainly easier for researchers to move from the United States to China than the other way around.
Simultaneous with Beijing’s outward efforts to attract visitors and researchers, it is also escalating its domestic campaign to fortify ‘national security’ against ‘foreign threats’ from foreign governments, press, and NGOs. The amended Anti-Espionage Law, passed in April 2023, expanded the scope of activities defined as endangering national security, which includes “publishing and disseminating information that endangers national security” and “using established social organizations and enterprises to conduct activities endangering national security.” In the same month, Chinese law enforcement raided the offices of consulting firms which provide information about Chinese markets to their foreign clients, including Bain & Company.
The Trump administration is not alone in using national security as a justification to tighten its control of academic institutions and limit ‘undesirable’ international involvement in domestic society and politics. Expectations from Western commentators that China would stand to gain from the escalations are understandable, but it is unlikely China can absorb all, or even most of the displaced researchers in the status quo. After all, the Chinese government is not about to welcome “LGBTQ graduate majors” into its universities either – feminist and queer advocacy, alongside organized labor, has long been seen as instruments of subversion paid for by ‘hostile foreign powers’. As these students are lost, the world will just get dumber.
On the Other Hand – Universities, Who Needs ‘Em?
It is foolish to look to the individual actions of any prominent member of the MAGA movement for a coherent logic. There is little to be found there except the injunction to enjoy. Enjoy every libidinal excess you can before this all catches up to us. Nonetheless, the continuity in the hostility successive White Houses have shown to Chinese nationals demonstrates that patterns can be found despite personal inconsistencies (TACO).
There is a complementarity between the Trump administration’s enmity toward Chinese students and American universities in general. The administration has already succeeded in financially weakening a large swath of American universities through the cancellation of research funding in its first 100 days. Now, according to Inside Higher Ed, if the administration’s Big Beautiful Bill passes, research in America will come to a screeching halt. The bill calls for $18 billion in cuts from the National Institutes of Health, $5 billion from the National Science Foundation, and $12 billion from the Education Department.
Of course, Havard offers the clearest overlap between visa threats and research funding cuts. To force direct MAGA oversight of the university, the Trump administration suspended $2.2 billion in federal funds as well as all new international student visas. The impact of the former is obvious, but roughly one quarter of Harvard’s students are international, meaning they are a major source of revenue for the university.
Harvard is challenging both attacks in federal court, but it also has a $50 billion endowment to draw from in the fight. Most colleges and universities in the United States are not so well off. In academic year 2023-24, America had 1.1 million international students studying in many of its 4,000 colleges. Most of these colleges depend on tuition to stay open, and in most cases international students are the only group guaranteed to pay full tuition. The now-retracted announcement from the State Department threatened about 25% of these students. If there were any substantial follow through, American universities, already weak, would have crumbled.
In a period where U.S.-China news is littered with articles about technological competition and AI development, the Trump administration’s double duty attack on Chinese nationals and American universities makes little sense. Wouldn’t it be bad for the national interest to weaken America’s research and technology edge? Not if we are entering a bold new ear of unskilled labor.
The MAGA world is deeply contradictory, but one theme that repeats is the return of factory production to the United States. Nominally, the tariffs at the heart of the trade war between the United States and China are about protecting and bolstering American manufacturing. The fantasy is that Americans will return to traditional, masculine factory work, leaving behind feminizing email jobs. Indeed, women themselves will be left behind at home. If making textiles on a factory floor is the birth of the new American Übermensch, we have a long way to go. For example, currently, 97% of the clothing sold in America is imported, and when clothing is made in America the only way to make it cheap enough to compete with imports is to use prison labor.
It’s not exactly a bold vision of the future, but it is one endorsed by Trump officials. In an interview with Tucker Carlson in April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that unemployment created by DOGE cuts to federal jobs was “shedding excess labor” that could then be redeployed in private sector manufacturing. Confusingly, this labor is supposed to be absorbed by factories that do not yet exist but, when built, will be highly automated through AI magic. Former federal employees will be hired to do jobs that are simultaneously made redundant through automation.
This contradictory vision of a backward-looking, AI-enabled factory future was also voiced by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in an interview with CNBC. His example of the future was an auto plant where workers service machines in jobs they hold their entire lives and pass down for generations. If this became a reality, a huge number of Americans would need to be far dumber than the machines they served with a smaller number of Americans trained to perform maintenance. In both cases, further automation would be a constant threat to employment. Nonetheless, the idea that what America needs is an abundance of unskilled labor is there. This component, the idea that there is a future need for higher numbers of unskilled workers, whether an empty talking point or truly believed, is deeply entwined with the attack on American universities. One available weapon in that attack also happens to threaten an adversary to which American elites on both sides have ascribed all the possibilities of the future and all their self-destructive envy. Never mind that China is not what they imagine.
The World Will Just Get Dumber
The AI race has demonstrated the lie behind the idea that China cannot innovatebecause it isn’t governed by liberal democracy. This does not mean, however, that Chinese universities can accommodate all the students with all their interests that could be lost if American intimidation does not stop. There is a remarkable convergence between China and the United States in what knowledge is deemed valuable and what knowledge should be suppressed. If there is a difference between the two, it is that the American assault on its own universities is far more comprehensive; you are free to say (most) of what you want but you won’t have a university quad on which to say it.
Whether the U.S.-China relationship must be a zero-sum game has been debated for years at this point. The question is whether every win needs to be a loss for the other side. The inverse is also a major feature of U.S.-China reporting. Every loss is automatically understood as a win for the other side. This is not the case. The frequent but often-ignored dynamic is much worse – a negative-sum game. Sometimes a loss is a loss for everyone. A loss in education here is not a win in education there. Sometimes the world will just get dumber.
Diego Ge is an intern for China Focus at The Carter Center and studies Political Science and International Comparative Studies at Duke University.
Nick Zeller is editor of The Monitor and a senior program associate for China Focus at The Carter Center.
The views expressed in this article represent those of the author(s) and not those of The Carter Center.
