Enhancing Scrutiny of Chinese Foreign Students Is Essential for National Security

O n May 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a bold statement: The State Department will aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or those studying in critical fields.

For decades, the CCP has systematically exploited American civil society vulnerabilities to achieve strategic objectives. This has included surveillance and sabotage, unfair trading practices, flooding our country with fentanyl, undermining our domestic politics, and stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property.

A primary vector for several of these destructive practices: hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, ubiquitous on our university campuses, including our elite STEM research programs.

China has leveraged the presence of these students to empower its military, high-tech sector, and domestic-suppression apparatus. At the same time, the Middle Kingdom exerts influence by throwing money at universities to buy favor and access while also covering the tuition of its students at full out-of-state rates.

Finally, the presence of CCP-influenced organizations such as Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs), the descendants of now largely defunct Confucius Institutes, has undermined basic standards of civil discourse on campuses.

Over the last 20 years, the number of Chinese foreign students has increased dramatically, from approximately 59,000 in 2000 to over 372,000 by 2019, mirroring the normalization of trade between the U.S. and China. Both trends were sold as opening up Chinese society to Western liberal influences — but that’s not what happened.

Instead, the malign influences of the CCP were imported into our nation.

An entire state-run CCP apparatus is dedicated to stealing intellectual property from U.S. college campuses. Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP John Moolenaar calls it “a well-documented, systematic pipeline to embed researchers in leading U.S. institutions, providing them direct exposure to sensitive technologies with dual-use military applications” and a “Trojan horse for Beijing.”

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reports that CCP satellite organizations deliberately cultivate networks of Chinese students abroad to appropriate sensitive research and illegally transfer it home for Beijing’s benefit. For example, the China Association for Science and Technology operates physical workstations in the United States, and CCP front groups sponsor students to submit copies of research to Chinese laboratories. Meanwhile, the Western Return Scholars Association steers returning students directly into critical industries where they reproduce work and immediately become an asset to the Chinese state. Other programs, like the Thousand Talents Plan, target American citizens, including ethnic Chinese, to share their research with China-based laboratories.

Some students operate individually and pursue opportunistic espionage. One Chinese foreign student who was president of the CSSA at the University of Florida was banned from the university for engaging in a scheme to divert drug samples, including toxins that could cause cholera and whooping cough, to a lab in China. A Stanford University student was indicted in July 2020 for lying about her affiliation with the Chinese military to get a research visa. In October 2024, five foreign Chinese students at the University of Michigan were indicted for surveilling a National Guard exercise and lying to police, claiming they were “Chinese media.”

The increase in Chinese foreign students correlates with the installation of the CSSAs, which the State Department has recognized as a tool of transnational repression, chilling free speech and assembly on campus. CSSAs are frequently activated to intimidate Chinese students abroad who engage in disapproved activities, also menacing Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others who highlight domestic oppression inside China.

China has also donated at least $2 billion to U.S. universities since 2010, with additional, undisclosed gifts hiding under the reporting threshold of $250,000. The FBI has cautioned that major gifts and donations from adversary countries are used to gain access to institutions and their personnel.

A massive and poorly vetted Chinese student population poses a direct threat to our national security. It is not normal to have hundreds of thousands of students from an adversary nation committing acts of surveillance, sabotage, and subversion at our nation’s universities.

The Department of Homeland Security can commence deportations once it receives guidance. In President Trump’s first term, he issued a proclamation ordering the DHS to remove students and instructors tied to the Chinese military.

We must now revoke the visas of Communist Party members and researchers in critical fields, and institute enhanced vetting for new visa applications. President Trump overturned decades of conventional wisdom to challenge an unequal and destructive trading relationship with China. Secretary Rubio’s initiative aspires to do the same regarding campus infiltration, and he should be applauded for his commitment to addressing this threat.