In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the United States-China Relationship Act into law. The law established permanent “normal” relations with China, thereby allowing China to join international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to be fully integrated into the global economic community. Clinton believed that relations between the United States and China would improve as China globalized.
However, fast forward to 2026, and the United States and China are consumed in ongoing struggles, such as maritime law disputes, a tariff war that threatened global trade and economic stability, and the race to A.I. dominance.
With a “bipartisan” consensus growing over the challenges China poses to the United States in fields such as technology and engineering, recent foreign policy discussions center on a group that, while often ignored, is central to any discussion of U.S.-China politics and relations—international students. Specifically, Chinese nationals who work or study in the United States.
With rising concerns about Chinese students and the potential threats they pose to national security, harsher restrictions However, these concerns and aforementioned policies raise questions about the future of Chinese students and their place in the United States. What does it mean to search for academic freedom in a country that actively restricts what you can say in the name of national security? What is the future for these students and American higher education?
- On Sino-American Grand Strategy
Any discussion of U.S. policy toward Chinese international students should be situated within the broader context of U.S. grand strategy.
As defined by John Gaddis in his seminal work On Grand Strategy, grand strategy refers to the phenomenon and challenge of pursuing one’s goals with necessarily limited means. In the context of governments, it is the phenomenon that attempts to describe the goals that states seek to achieve and how they go about doing so.
Traditionally, during the height of the Cold War, U.S. grand strategy centered on containing the perceived threat that communism posed to Western liberal democracy and to U.S. interests domestically and abroad. While some framed China as an adversary during the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy often treated the USSR as its principal rival. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy toward China involved both confronting it at the height of the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis. This required it to engage in diplomatic efforts with Beijing to isolate and overextend the USSR. This push and pull between recognizing China as both a rival regional power and a potentially useful actor to pit against the USSR epitomized the U.S grand strategy. The United States recognized it must choose its battles carefully to avoid overstretch, simultaneously making compromises in the interim to accomplish its broader goal of defeating the USSR.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man that liberalism had successfully defeated communism, thereby cementing its hegemony as the highest form of human civilization and the ideology. For Fukuyama and his colleagues, all that remained was to build the world through globalization and the strengthening of liberal international institutions such as the UN and the WTO. Thus, U.S. grand strategy had to evolve from the era of great-power competition championed by Henry Kissinger to the neoliberal vision of an interconnected and cooperative world pursued by President Clinton and Fukuyama.
During Clinton’s presidency, the era of cooperation and global interconnectedness dictating U.S. grand strategy was in full swing. Part of President Clinton’s motivations for wishing to add China to the global economic community was the belief that globalization would force China to liberalize as a society. China’s entry into the WTO would not only add an additional billion consumers to the global economy but would also, in theory, subject China to the same rules of economic engagement as every other WTO member. China would be required to comply with the same intellectual property laws that prevent it from promoting or facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods. It would be subject to tightening labor regulations and practices once it was considered a “developed” country under the WTO guidelines. Then, China would theoretically be incentivized to liberalize its society, as non-democratic societies would become increasingly marginalized in a more connected world.
Whether these lofty ideals or goals were actually achieved is up for debate, and there is conflicting evidence for both sides. What is not up for debate, though, is that Clinton’s acceptance of China could only have occurred in the historical context of the time, when there was broad bipartisan support for a globalized economy with fewer trade barriers. That consensus was forged in large part because American society believed in the hegemony of the Western liberal democratic order , having successfully defeated the threat communism posed to American ideological values.
However, recent developments have shattered that veneer of this liberal order. With the rise of China’s economy, it became increasingly clear to many that China under Xi Jinping would remain communist in nature and pose challenges to American unipolarity. With a revitalized economy, many in the American government began raising alarms about the potential threat China poses to American national security.
In particular, American national security practitioners are becoming increasingly fixated on the threat that Chinese academics pose to American national security. In an investigation titled “From Ph.D. to PLA” (PLA referring to China’s “People’s Liberation Army”), American legislators and practitioners argue that many Chinese students pose a literal national security threat to the United States because of their ties to the PLA. In particular, a phrase that frequently appears in discourse about Chinese students in the United States is “critical fields.” For the last two decades, the Department of State has referred to critical fields as areas of crucial national interest—notably STEM-related fields such as engineering.
All of these broader notions of U.S. grand strategy and attempts to fortify domestic affairs against Chinese interference overshadow the human stories of students who now live under greater instability and precarity. In writing this article, I want to shed the light on the experiences of students who come to the United States, and the challenges they face as a result to current administration policy. I set out to interview five Chinese international students from across the country seeking to better understand their personal experiences that motivated them to study in the United States, and the challenges they face.
When interviewing Chinese international students, I wanted to focus on common themes across the interviews and, if possible, on any relationship they see between their treatment here in the United States and broader American grand strategy. Throughout these conversation and interviews, there were a few themes central to their experiences.
First was academic freedom. By academic freedom, I generally refer to a student’s ability to discuss, write, or publish opinions on a wide range of issues without disciplinary or governmental reprisals. Many of the Chinese international students I interviewed came to the United States because it offered greater academic freedom than China. Academic freedom was often a motivating factor for students who wanted to deeply explore the humanities or social sciences, as schools in the United States offered a breadth of classes related to the Western Canon, and free speech protections would allow students who wished to stay in the United States to openly discuss issues that would be controversial in mainland China. All of these interviews were conducted anonymously. The first was with a Yale student. She described how she wanted to come to the United States from a young age because she was exposed to American academic culture, and she wished to experience it as a young adult and professional. While she notes that she still retains more academic freedom here in the States than she did back home post-Trump Administration, she recognizes a tangible difference in the academic freedom she enjoyed outside the classroom due to ongoing political issues, compared with what she had prior to the Trump Administration. She has become more cognizant of what she posts on Instagram and experienced a period of “panic” during which she attempted to delete her social media presence, which could be flagged by administrators in future visa interviews.
Over the past year, academic freedom and freedom of expression have become larger points of concern for students, both those already here and prospective students looking to study in the United States. [Redacted name] is a student at Stanford University who originally applied with the intention of studying history before becoming a computer science major. As somebody deeply interested in global affairs and history, he often finds himself wishing to express his viewpoints outloud. However, recent administration crackdowns on the freedom of expression of other international students, such as a recent deportation of a UCLA student, have chilled his ability to even be seen or associate with domestic students who are part of certain causes. While a pro-Palestinian protest was ongoing, [Redacted name] and another one of his friends decided to leave the area—not because they did not support the protest—but because they were worried that if somebody were to take a picture of them sitting nearby the event, that officials would use said photos to incriminate them, potentially leading to removal from the university or even the country.
This incident underscores one of the subtle yet tangible costs for students seeking a liberal education in the United States. The United States promotes itself as a bastion and champion of free speech, advertising it to the rest of the world. In turn, American institutions such as Yale and Stanford advertise that their students can pursue their passions and speak out passionately and informatively about issues they care about. While it could be the case that international students are particularly afraid of directly commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to its uniquely charged and controversial nature, at least in the United States, it is impossible to divorce the reality that the most scrutinized and thus worried class of students are Chinese. When listening to statements made by American politicians, it is clear that while Palestinian activism is a core factor in policing the speech of students, the underlying reasoning is a worry that international students are posing threats to the safety and internal stability of college campuses in the United States. In effect, many American politicians are suggesting that Chinese international students are inciting pro-Palestinian sentiments that are then seen as destabilizing security and sentiments here in the United States. When tensions between the United States and China escalate to the point where anything or anybody can be perceived as a threat to each other’s internal social order, it makes sense that the ones who pay the cost for this distorted version of reality are the ones who stand the most to lose—international students.
To demonstrate the differing ways that domestic and international students approach potential disciplinary infractions, one may turn to a key facet of American college life—underage drinking and illicit drug use. For better or worse, American college life is defined by alcohol consumption and illicit drug use, with an estimated fifty percent of students in college consuming alcohol, and another twenty percent having consumed illicit drugs. When I broached the topic to them, they all remarked on how they explicitly avoid attending parties or consuming substances such as marijuana because even being associated with either scenario would massively increase the chance that they would be arrested and potentially removed from the country. For domestic students, a disciplinary violation or interaction with law enforcement is an infraction; for international students, it means risking removal from the country.
The second common theme was work opportunities and the looming concerns over visas. All five students I interviewed mentioned that their greatest concern was, in some way, related to securing employment after graduation, given the uncertain future of work visas for Chinese nationals. Due to ambiguous changes in U.S. policy, many firms are wary of hiring Chinese nationals because they may be unable to obtain clearance to work in certain sectors, remain in the country for extended periods, or obtain work authorization. Compounding these fast-paced challenges in visa policy is the State Department’s unclear communication about future changes. Because the current administration announces policy changes on a whim and poorly communicates their implications, it leaves both international students and domestic firms in the dark about the implications of new policies and their impact on the labor market post-graduation. Faced with these uncertainties, firms are more likely to hire other skilled international workers who do not face the same scrutiny as Chinese nationals or settle for domestic talent.
Notably, my conversation with the Stanford computer science major revealed another challenge for Chinese international students in securing summer employment or postgraduate positions. Many firms that hire engineers or computer scientists have contracts with the United States Federal Government that include billions of dollars in funding in exchange for developing technologies crucial to national security. From their own experiences, Chinese students often find themselves severely disadvantaged as these firms are wary of hiring Chinese nationals. Even one Chinese national could theoretically pose a security risk that could undermine national security. Given that many of the top-paying tech firms are also government contractors, this, on top of visa restrictions, is placing even greater strains on Chinese students’ ability to find work and remain in the United States.
Third, despite these visa restrictions, the Chinese international students wish to stay in the United States. That said, they also have contingency plans if they are forced to leave. For the Stanford computer science major, their strategy is to apply to graduate school as a backup in the event he is initially denied a work visa, gambling on future visa policies that may be less restrictive or on his having better luck in the next round of job recruitment. That said, while these students remain cautiously optimistic, they are also exploring other options in case all these plans fall apart. For the student Yale, she is considering other countries that currently accept international students for work visas, such as the United Kingdom and Singapore.
The last theme that arose from my conversations was the antagonism Chinese PhD students face when applying for visas or admission to the United States, which actively discourages them from pursuing their studies and professional careers in the United States. Back home, these students receive offers from multiple universities worldwide, including in Europe, so they see less incentive to study in another country that scrutinizes their very existence on national security grounds.
What is clear, however, from my interviews with Chinese students already in the United States, is that they remain cautiously optimistic and committed to remaining here. What initially drew them was the relative academic freedom they were granted, and they appreciated the economic opportunities they would have if they were allowed to stay in the country. However, for prospective students, these recent barriers seem to be actively discouraging them from studying or working in the United States. Even for current students, this process makes them more cautious and cognizant of the precarious status they hold until they become American citizens or permanent residents.
Discussions of foreign policy often center around topics such as the future development of AI or the impending threat of military escalation and miscalculations, while neglecting the impact rising tensions have on ordinary people. In these discussions, it is often easy to forget the real people that are caught in the middle as states shift policies like pieces on the world’s most dangerous game of chess. But the costs of ongoing tensions are felt intensely by young students who are seeking to pursue a better life for themselves.