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A China expert warns that President Donald Trump’s Chinese student visa push amid trade talks between the United States and China could exacerbate the growing CCP “influence” in American universities.
China policy expert Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, explains where things stand right now, as several conservatives sounded the alarm on how the push could enable the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the U.S.
Sobolik explained that Chinese students in the United States can become a major national security liability, adding that the CCP has taken advantage of Chinese nationals to “advance malign influence operations.”
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“They do this by re-appropriating basic and applied research in American universities, taking it over to China, and stealing American innovations, essentially,” he said. “And they also will conduct espionage. They will silence Chinese students on American campuses and force them to either advance the CCP propaganda line or silence them. And that’s just unacceptable.”
Sobolik continued by pointing out the history of the trade agreements between Trump and Xi Jinping.
“I think it’s partially a function of the fact that [Trump’s] trying to get to a trade deal with Xi Jinping and he wants to smooth that road, make sure there aren’t any bumps along the way, much like he did in his first term when he was trying to get his phase one trade agreement with China negotiated,” he said.
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President Donald Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting that the “college system would go to hell very quickly” if the Chinese student visa policy were significantly altered.
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“And it wouldn’t be the top colleges, so it’d be colleges that struggle on the bottom. And you take out 300,000 or 600,000 students out of the system,” Trump said.
“I like having, and I told this to President Xi that we’re honored to have their students here. Now, with that, we check in with careful and we see who’s there,” the president continued.
“President Trump isn’t proposing an increase in student visas for Chinese students. The 600K references two years worth of visas,” a White House official told Fox News on Thursday. “It’s simply a continuation of existing policy.”
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Sobolik said universities will ultimately go along with the “repressive tactics of China,” as he says students are willing to attend American institutions for their full price.
“It’s not just STEM programs and security risks. It is not just what China’s government is doing on these campuses. It’s how universities are complicit in it because they need that money. It’s all about the bottom line for them, and American values suffer in the process,” Sobolik added.
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