Chinese student deportations sign of shift in policy

The Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed disappointment and anger after a Chinese student was repatriated back to China from the United States last week. The student's visa was groundlessly revoked after being detained and questioned for more than 20 hours by US border control staff at San Francisco International Airport. This was at least the second time the ministry has responded to similar incidents in two months.

The US out of political purposes has been frequently harassing, interrogating, and deporting Chinese students without just cause since 2019. As Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular news conference on Friday in Beijing, the acts by the US far exceed the scope of normal law enforcement and have a strong ideological bias.

The US moves seriously infringe on the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of the persons concerned, disturb normal cross-border travel between China and the US and go against the common understandings reached by the two presidents on enhancing and facilitating China-US cultural and people-to-people exchanges. That's why China strongly deplores and firmly opposes this and has made solemn demarches to the US.

The US always portrays itself as being open to US-China cultural and people-to-people exchanges and welcoming Chinese students to study in the US. In fact, as Mao pointed out, the US keeps overstretching the concept of national security and takes selective, discriminatory and politically motivated law enforcement actions against Chinese students. These actions are essentially driven by the Cold War mentality held by certain people in the US.

Washington should realize that its unfair treatment of Chinese students has already prompted many students who plan to study abroad to divert their attention from the US to other developed countries. If it does not change course, the US will lose its appeal to Chinese students and travelers.

That will unavoidably affect the US' interests, as the Chinese students, a major body of international students in the US, are not only a main source of revenue for the country's schools and colleges but also a key source of foreign talents for US companies, labs and universities.

For decades, the US administration pinned high hopes on influencing young Chinese people to regard the US as a friendly and open country, and work for the improvement of Sino-US relations in the future. That the US takes the initiative to turn down the young people from China who look forward to studying in the US would have been unimaginable back then.

The only explanation is that Washington has de facto given up its plan of influencing the young Chinese people in that way. So although it still claims that it recognizes the importance of the people-to-people exchanges, its rude treatment of the Chinese students over the past few years is a clearly telling sign of a paradigm shift in its China policy.