Beijing has protested in solemn démarches to the United States over the interrogations at American airports since November of tens of Chinese students per month.
Some of the students had been repatriated to China. Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at least eight Chinese students had been deported groundlessly by US immigration authorities at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC.
He said the moves of US law enforcement authorities seriously violated the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of the students concerned and disrupted China-US cultural exchanges and cross-border travel.
He added that the practice went against the common understandings reached by the Chinese and US presidents in San Francisco last November on enhancing and facilitating cultural and people-to-people exchanges.
“The US likes to portray itself as open, inclusive and a place advocating academic freedom and ‘no border in science’ but it politicizes and weaponizes academic research, and over-stretches the concept of national security to wantonly suppress and ill-treat Chinese students,” he said. “The moves by the US driven by ideological bias with no respect for truth or rationality are discriminatory and politically motivated law enforcement and will eventually undermine America’s own image.”
Wang’s comments came after Xie Feng, Chinese ambassador to the US, said in a Chinese New Year event on January 28 that blocking Chinese students from entering the US will hurt Sino-US relations.
“Recently, Florida has unveiled a law to ban Chinese students from entering public schools’ laboratories,” Xie said. “On a monthly basis, tens of Chinese students, who hold valid visas and have no criminal records, have been denied entry to the US recently.”
He said these students, who returned to the US after traveling overseas or going home, were taken to a small dark room and interrogated by officers for up to eight hours.
“They were not allowed to contact their parents. They faced groundless accusations and were forcibly repatriated and banned from entering the US,” he said. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”
He said the chilling effect of the United States’s “China Initiative” program has not yet gone away.
The China Initiative program was launched by the Trump administration in 2018, aiming to prosecute perceived Chinese spies in American research and industry. In February 2022, the US Department of Justice announced the end of the program, which was accused of racially profiling Chinese American citizens and other residents of Chinese origin or ancestry.
On Monday, the Chinese Embassy in the US said the Chinese students, who were interrogated by officers at the Dulles International Airport, also had their electronic devices checked. It said some students were restricted from personal freedom for more than 10 hours and prohibited from contacting the outside world.
“The relevant practices of US law enforcement officers at the border have seriously affected the studies of Chinese students and caused great psychological damage to them,” it said. “We strongly urge the US to stop its wrong practices.”
Lacking confidence?
Chinese columnist Mei Zhengqing says in an article published on Thursday that, after then-US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in May 2020 to suspend the entry of certain Chinese students and researchers into the US, the Biden administration further strengthened the practice.
“The number of Chinese students who received their visas from the US significantly dropped in 2023. Even if they got the visas, some students were denied entry to the US due to national security reasons,” Mei says. “They included science, engineering, liberal arts and business students.”
She says the US lacks confidence in itself as it discriminates against and persecutes Chinese students and scholars by denying their entry to the country.
“As the only superpower on this planet, the US lacks confidence in itself as it treats all things, including Chinese students, as its enemy,” Wang Zhongyu, a Hunan-based commentator, writes in an article. “The United States is losing international support due to its hegemonic practice against China.”
There were cases that Chinese students or scholars were caught spying for the Chinese government in the US. But some faced false accusations.
In January last year, Ji Chaoqun, a 31-year-old former Chicago graduate student in electrical engineering, was convicted of acting as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security and making a material false statement to the US Army.
Last May, Xi Xiaoxing, a professor at Temple University, said he would sue the Federal Bureau of Investigation for falsely accusing him of spying for China.
People-to-people exchanges
Public data showed that about 290,000 Chinese students were in the US last year, representing 27% of the foreign students in the country. China said it has more than 1.3 million students studying abroad.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden met face-to-face in Bali in November 2022, both sides said they welcomed strengthening people-to-people exchanges between students, scholars and businesses.
In their last meeting in San Francisco on November 15 last year, the two leaders reiterated the same goal. Xi said China wants to invite 50,000 American young people to study in the country in the next five years.
Last year, there were only 350 American students studying in China, down from 11,000 in 2019. The decline was a result of the pandemic and rising tensions between the US and China.
Read: US research firm curbed over alleged Xinjiang spying
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