Do Chinese students and employees come to the US to steal intellectual property?

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in his recent speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, negated every aspect of China-US relations, maliciously attacked the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China's political system, and attempted to drive a wedge between the CPC and the Chinese people. He also wantonly criticized China's domestic and foreign policies, spread the so-called "China threat", and called for an anti-China alliance to contain China's development.

Pompeo's baseless, fact-distorting speech misrepresents history and the reality. It is full of ideological prejudice and driven by a Cold-War mentality. His remarks have not only been condemned by the Chinese people, but also criticized and opposed by sensible people in the United States as well as the international community.

To debunk the lies fabricated by Pompeo, let the facts speak for themselves.

Rumor:

Mike Pompeo: Many Chinese students and employees come to the US to steal intellectual property.

Fact:

The United States cooked up false charges against the normal scientific, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation with China based on the presumption of guilt. Such actions run counter to its self-proclaimed ideas of openness and freedom, the public commitments made by US leaders, and the global trend of personnel exchanges, and have caused serious and negative impact on people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.

-- The past four decades have seen growing cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two sides, with over 5 million mutual visits recorded every year. Exchanges and cooperation in education and scientific research, in particular, have yielded fruitful results and benefited both countries. China has been one of the most popular destinations for American students in the past 40 years, during which more than 330,000 American students have come to China to further their study. China has also been the largest source of overseas students for the United States for 10 consecutive years. In the 2018-2019 academic year alone, the number of Chinese students in the United States totaled 370,000, accounting for one third of the country's international students. In addition, as the statistics of the US National Science Foundation suggest, China and the United States are each other's largest collaborating country in internationally co-authored papers and their interdependence far exceeds other countries.

-- It is in the interest of both sides to boost exchanges and cooperation in areas like science and technology. As shown in Global AI Talent Tracker, a report published in mid-June by the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank MacroPolo, America's big lead in AI is inseparable from China's talent pool, with nearly one third of these researchers completing their undergraduate education in China.

-- In his book The Gift of Global Talent, William Kerr, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, said that inventors with Chinese descent accounted for over 10 percent of patents in the United States. In 2018, for example, Chinese students in the United States reached 370,000, bringing about 20 billion US dollars of benefits to the US economy. Turning a blind eye to the contribution of Chinese students and researchers and acting in disregard of the objection from their own scholars, American politicians are putting their own country's interests at stake.

-- After the US Department of Homeland Security put out the announcement to bar international students taking only online classes from obtaining visas or maintaining current visas, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) filed a lawsuit against the action, contending that the order violates the Administrative Procedure Act, because the policy lacked reasonable justification and the public was not given notice to comment on it. Universities and institutions of higher learning across the country have joined Harvard and MIT in the lawsuit or filed lawsuits on their own. Many of them describe the new visa rules as "policymaking at its worst," "cruel and reckless" and "deeply misguided."

-- For some time, the United States, out of its ideological bias, has made Chinese students and researchers the target of surveillance, harassment and willful detention, and fabricated absurd charges like "espionage" against Chinese scholars under the presumption of guilt. These US actions have seriously violated the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens and severely disrupted normal cultural and personnel exchanges between the two countries. Such practices are outright political persecution, which not only goes against morality and justice, but also hurts the United States' own image. MIT President Rafael Reif said in an open letter to the university in 2019 that the "unfair scrutiny" targeting Chinese would "create a toxic atmosphere of unfounded suspicion and fear", bringing harm to this world-renowned research university and the United States.