Anger in China as U.S. cancels visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students, researchers deemed security risks

Beijing on Thursday criticised the United States (U.S.) for banning Chinese students and researchers deemed security risks from entering the country, after the U.S. government announced the day before that more than 1,000 visas had been revoked since June.
 
Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said this in a statement.
 
Zhao said that the ban contradicted the concept of openness and freedom in the U.S, comparing the action to political persecution and racial discrimination.
 
He said that the human rights of Chinese students in the U.S. would be seriously violated and also threatened retaliation.
 
The visas were revoked on the basis of a May 29 presidential proclamation to suspend entry into the U.S. to Chinese students and researchers deemed security risks.
 
“The proclamation safeguards U.S. national security by limiting [China’s] ability to leverage Chinese graduate students and researchers in the U.S. to steal U.S. technologies, intellectual property, and information to develop advanced military capabilities,” the spokesperson said.
 
“The high-risk graduate students and research scholars made ineligible under this proclamation represent a small subset of the total number of Chinese students and scholars coming to the United States,” the statement added.
 
“We continue to welcome legitimate students and scholars from China who do not further the Chinese Communist Party’s goals of military dominance.”
 
The statement comes a week after Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said that senior Chinese diplomats would need approval from the U.S. government to visit university campuses and meet with local officials.
 
It also follows the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, China, in July in retaliation for the closure of China’s consulate in the Texan city of Houston “in order to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information.”
 
The tit-for-tat closures had further ratcheted up tensions between the two countries, whose relations were already fraught due to disagreements over ongoing trade disputes.
 
Other reasons for the fraught relations include: the coronavirus pandemic, repression in China’s far-western Xinjiang region and Beijing’s moves to quash pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
The U.S. revoked the visas under a presidential measure denying entry to students and researchers deemed security risks, the State Department said on Wednesday.
The acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, said earlier that Washington was blocking visas “for certain Chinese graduate students and researchers with ties to China’s military fusion strategy to prevent them from stealing and otherwise appropriating sensitive research.”
In a speech, Wolf repeated U.S. charges of unjust business practices and industrial espionage by China, including attempts to steal coronavirus research, and accused it of abusing student visas to exploit American academia.
Wolf said the U.S. was also “preventing goods produced from slave labour from entering our markets, demanding that China respect the inherent dignity of each human being,” an apparent reference to accusations of abuse of Muslims in western Xinjiang.
A State Department spokeswoman said the visa action followed a May 29 proclamation by President Donald Trump as part of the U.S. response to China’s curbs on democracy in Hong Kong.
“As of September 8, 2020, the department has revoked more than 1,000 visas of PRC nationals who were found to be subject to Presidential Proclamation 10043 and therefore ineligible for a visa,” she said.
She said the ineligible “high-risk graduate students and research scholars” were “a small subset” of the Chinese coming to the U.S. for study and research, and that legitimate students and scholars would continue to be welcomed.
About 360,000 Chinese nationals study in the U.S., bringing its colleges significant revenue, though the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted the return to campus this autumn semester.
China-U.S. relations have sunk to historic lows with the world’s two biggest economies clashing over issues ranging from trade and human rights to Hong Kong and the coronavirus.
Trump, who had touted friendly ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping as he sought to make good on promises to rebalance a massive trade deficit, has made getting tough on China a key part of his campaign for re-election on November 3.
He has accused his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who leads in national opinion polls, of being soft toward Beijing.
Some Chinese students enrolled in U.S. universities said they learnt of the cancellations in emailed notices received on Wednesday from the U.S. embassy in Beijing or consulates in China.
In a WeChat chatroom, more than 70 holders of F-1 visas, both postgraduates and undergraduates, said the notices advised them to seek new visas if they wanted to travel to the U.S.
Many said they were majoring in subjects such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 
Some said they had secured bachelor’s degrees at Chinese universities with links to the People’s Liberation Army.
A final-year undergraduate student of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign expressed shock at getting the notice.
The only reason he could think of could be prior experience at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), he said.
The university is known for its defense and security technology research.
“I studied at BUPT before year two, but I have no connections with that university since,” he said on condition of anonymity as the subject is sensitive.