“The new visa policy puts America in the first place, not China. Under the leadership of President Trump, the State Department of the United States will work with the Department of Internal Security in order to aggressively recall visas for Chinese students, including those associated with the Chinese Communist Party or study in critical areas,” the statement said.
Rubio added that the authorities will reconsider the visa criteria in order to strengthen the audit of all future statements for visas from the Chinese People’s Republic and Hong Kong.
The New York Times notes that 275 thousand Chinese students are studying in the USA. In recent years, American officials have expressed concern that the Chinese government has been hiring scientists in the United States, although there is no evidence that such scientists work in China in large numbers, the publication said.
It is not clear how quickly the State Department and the US Department of Internal Security will take measures to cancel the visas of the affected students and whether China will take response to a relatively small number of American students in the country.
In 2024, there were only about 800 American students in China, writes The New York Times. This reflects the fears of many Americans to visit China, especially after three years of isolation during coronavirus pandemia. In 2019, there were about 11 thousand American students.
Until now, family members of most officials of the China Communist Party could study at American universities, the publication notes. Many senior party functionaries have sent children to American universities in recent decades. In particular, the head of the PRC Xi Jinping sent his daughter Si Minjie to study at Harvard University under a pseudonym. The Harvard administration and several professors knew who she was, even before her release in 2014.
