On June 11, 2025, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a highly anticipated meeting with American President Donald Trump regarding the ongoing trade war between the two nations.
In this conversation, President Xi requested that Chinese students be allowed to continue their studies in American universities in exchange for reduced tariffs and continued access to the critical rare earths on which the U.S. is dependent.
This request by Xi was most likely issued due to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s press statement, which officially identified the risks posed by Chinese students studying in U.S. Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (STEM) fields:
Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
Following his meeting with President Xi, Trump granted his request, permitting Chinese students to continue studying in American universities. This tacit deal was made following a trade agreement reached between China and the U.S. in London, in which severe export restrictions of rare earths were lifted in exchange for a reduction in tariff measures imposed by President Trump. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies states:
The centrality of rare earth export restrictions to the trade deal underscores the criticality of minerals to the U.S. economy as well as the severity of the chokehold Beijing holds on global supply chains.
Regardless of one’s policy stance on whether Trump made the right decision given the importance of rare earths to the American technological economy, the request by President Xi exposes the importance that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) places on the continued access, education, and training of its 277,398 students studying in American universities.
As I have previously reported, more than half of graduate students in STEM fields at American universities are foreign-born, with the largest shares coming from China and India—both geopolitical rivals of the United States. Under China’s National Security laws, Chinese graduate students can be compelled to provide information to their government, effectively making each of them a potential spy for Beijing.
Graph by Statista
Indeed, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) encourages Chinese STEM students to “comprehensively consider the continuity of their research work when in China with what they are studying overseas and fully take advantage of the cutting-edge research conditions and environment abroad.”
This access is critical for the CCP, as it seeks to advance its STEM-centered civil-military fusion doctrine, which is designed to provide China with a competitive edge in the military, space, and technological fields.
Advanced dual-use technologies are transferred, distilled, or stolen from the West and developed specifically to provide the PLA with next-generation weapons to defeat the U.S. in both physical and cyber domains. The CCP is effectively taking a page from the Thirty-Six Ancient Stratagems of China and “killing America with a borrowed knife”—attacking the U.S. by leveraging the strength of a perceived ally: its own educational institutions, corporations, and firms. The goal is to weaken America economically, technologically, and, if necessary, militarily. As seen in the lax enforcement of artificial intelligence (AI) regulations under both the Biden and Trump administrations, America has heavily staked its future on AI innovation to remain competitive against peer rivals such as China and India. As constitutional law professor John O. McGinnis says:
Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern … If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.
While AI innovation is of critical importance in the economic and geopolitical fields, many U.S. tech firms have sought to undermine the national interest through a “dromocratic approach”—a term meaning the exercise of power by speed and acceleration.
Indeed, technology CEO’s have recognized that through swiftly creating innovative forms of technology, they can stay ahead of legislation and regulations. They then seek to export this unregulated cutting-edge tech to foreign markets with high market potential before any regulatory boundaries can be put in place to protect America’s national security.
[RELATED: H-1B Visa Undermines American Students and Workers]
Therefore, while the American university system’s close collaboration with U.S. tech firms is necessary to compete with China in the newly unfolding AI race, without adequate regulatory measures to block American tech firms from dealing with China or its closely allied partners, critical research and innovations will be transferred directly or indirectly to Beijing’s digital servers thereby strengthening its hand in setting new global standards aligned with the CCP’s goals of global domination.
China’s ultimate goal is to achieve digital sovereignty and technological dominance through second-generation indigenization of weapons and education.
Bruno Macaes of the European Council on Foreign Relations explains that while the American System set the global financial standards and rules following the end of the Cold War, China seeks to reset these standards in a Multipolar world by dominating the underlying technology sectors and crafting new standards and norms under its own auspices. Experts term this the Beijing Effect:
Chinese companies provide digital infrastructure and platforms to partner countries along the Belt and Road, thereby shaping the conditions under which these countries will transition to the digital economy. The result is the endorsement of Chinese data governance principles of governmental control.
China, has built its newly unfolding tech acquisition strategy based upon a clear comprehension of America’s democratic system, recognizing through a deft study in American governance—they should know most of them were educated here—that politicians are influenced by monetary lobbying, that legislation in Congress moves at a glacial pace and that American corporations when left to their own devices will sell to the highest bidder unless prohibited by American legal requirements.
This is why the CCP party mandarins claim that the American system is an industrial system for a digital age, as it is much easier for the CCP, with its statist model, to shift from one approach to attaining critical information and technology to another, long before American legislation can be enacted to arrest its progress. This strategy is analogous to the dromocratic approach practiced by our tech corporations to outpace sound AI regulation.
Thus, America is acting in a centrifugal motion—moving away from the center—and hollowing itself out for the gain of a few, such as our manufacturing industries, while China is acting in a centripetal motion, strengthening its core comprehensive national wealth and power for the interests of the state. All of China’s corporations, from the smallest business to the largest firms, work in a coterminous alignment with the CCP’s directives.
In China, technology corporations follow the flag, yet in the U.S., the flag follows the technological corporations. While there is considerable debate over decoupling in the U.S., it is worth noting that China’s goal is to decouple from the U.S.
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China’s ultimate goal is to achieve digital sovereignty and technological dominance through second-generation indigenization of weapons and education. This will permit them to gain what they term as complete battlefield control through AI technology, as they will be on par with the U.S. in the cyber realm and will be able to create new higher education systems that are far more advanced in the STEM fields, permitting them to supersede the U.S. in the long term
China is thus not seeking AI supremacy but rather AI dominance—and dominance is as much about cognitive perception as it is about physical conquest.
Chinese officials and executives have a saying that third-tier companies produce products, second-tier companies develop technology, and top companies establish standards. Much as the American system set the financial standards following World War II, China seeks to establish the technological standards of the next century, utilizing products and technology generated in America—the upper structure—to reset the foundational digital understructure on a global level by influencing the digital standards set with foreign nations.
Yet this is merely a transitional phase, as China has also grown technologically strong enough to launch a counter-offensive in the form of next-generation educational technology, which will alter the perceptions, hearts, and minds of billions of individuals across the Global South.
President Xi Jinping is a prime advocate of this educational mirror system, stating the “importance of sci-tech modernization as key to China’s ambitions of becoming a global leader by 2035.”
For this vision to be accomplished, Chinese institutions of higher learning must be regarded as the Gold Standard within the STEM fields. In 2022, China surpassed the U.S. in the number of highly cited scientific research papers, reflecting the quality and influence that have made its educational system a competitive rival to Western institutions. The Diplomat reports that:
whilst Chinese universities are ‘extremely international,’ international now means ‘Global South and not the Western world.’ Historically, international partnerships between Chinese and Western universities, such as the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, formed the foundation of China’s international outlook. This has evolved, with China now looking beyond Western partners, driven in part by the Belt and Road Initiative.
China has utilized Western universities and researchers not to collaborate with them, but to deceive them, building upon the intellectual genius of the West. It is now set to export a new system of surveillance universities across the global South. (Read, “A Surveillance University Is Rising in the Desert—And the West Is Helping Build It.”) Much like the center of economic gravity shifted from Europe to the U.S. following World War II, China now seeks to shift the educational gravity to its center—citing in Mandarin instead of English to control linguistic soft power—and much like the mirror systems of BRICS, SCO and CIPS, it seeks to subvert the rival higher educational institutions of the West, while remaining a participant in these institutions as it expands and strengthens the systems controlled by Beijing.
China has also launched its Double First-Class Educational Initiative, which aims to position China’s higher education system at the forefront of research citations and publishing in the STEM disciplines. This system will enable China to steal research from Western universities, expedite its peer review, and then publish the research as its own. This research can then be legally patented and applied on an international level, giving Chinese corporations a competitive edge over Western competitors.
[RELATED: Trump Allows Chinese Students into U.S. Universities in Exchange for Rare Earth Minerals]
The United Nations conducted a recent analysis that found over 38,000 GenAI patents originated from China, six times more than those filed by inventors in the U.S., which came in second place. Out of the top ten applicants, the top four were Chinese corporations.
University World News further reports that Chinese Minister of Education Huai Jinpeng made clear in a meeting with the National People’s Congress that the CCP will, “moderately expand the signature programs with a focus on advantageous disciplines that more precisely match the country’s strategic goals,” as in recent years China has been eliminating university humanities programmes to make way for more technology programs related to key industries.
In China, humanities are manufactured to fit the party narrative, and the STEM fields are directed to align with the CCP’s goals.
In addition, China is establishing its own domestic standards and rulebooks, such as the Chinese Social Science Citation Index, and has also established its own Academic Ranking of World Universities, where the standards and values will be set by the CCP, rather than Western academics. This Chinese ranking system is now viewed as the third most influential ranking, alongside the Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings.
To wit, China has also launched its first intelligent universities initiative, where China’s top STEM institutions are brought into a coordinated alignment directed by CCP programs, all under the operational management of Huawei.
Shenzhen No.2 Experimental School acts as a benchmark for digital transformation in the education field both locally and globally. Currently, the global intelligent campus showcase of the school has been officially put into use, attracting education institutions from around the world to familiarize themselves with state-of-the-art digital education technologies. They can make appointments with Huawei and visit the school to experience first-hand intelligent campus in action, as well as exchange trends and insights into digital transformation in the field.
These campuses utilize the latest 6G technology and are part of a pilot program to be expanded globally, allowing CCP operatives access to all research generated within these innovative campuses.
For the interested reader, 6G connects the non-digital to the digital:
Future 6G networks will bridge physical things, people and activities into a fully cyber-physical world where the digital and physical worlds as we know them today have merged. This will provide new ways of interacting with the world around us, new possibilities to connect from anywhere and new ways to experience faraway places and cultures. In doing so, 6G will form the bedrock of a more human-friendly, sustainable and efficient future society.
For Beijing, 6G will be the perfect tool for conducting pervasive surveillance on a global scale, enabling the monitoring of faraway places and shaping cultures.
Huawei states that these newly unrolling surveillance campuses will serve “as a model for the construction of intelligent campuses worldwide, providing advanced concepts for the informatization of the global education industry.” In the coming years, intelligent universities will be distributed across the globe like an educational string of pearls, aiding China in the creation of its newly unfolding Digital Silk Road and the establishment of a new technocratic global order based in Beijing.
While there are many advocates of international education and open exchange, in this newly unfolding multi-polar world, where Great Power competition has once again taken the fore, an adjusted approach to international education must be enacted to match the new realities of technological competition.
Many Western commentators state that China’s top university institutions will not attain global supremacy. Julian Fisher, the CEO of Venture Education, which is based in Beijing, suggests that “social life … the vibrancy and beauty of a campus and the opportunities for social impact,” will be key indicators for a university’s ranking.
These ethical values are indeed important; yet, China is not interested in the leafy college campuses and a university experience for its students, but rather in the STEM fields and the fusion of civil and military applications. The CCP is employing a different logical calculus, one that prioritizes social cohesion, social control, and the militarization of new technological advancements to expand its global influence.
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In the West, Socrates advised the wisdom seeker to “know thyself,” but in China, Confucius advised his pupils to “know thy role.”
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has stated that, “Scientific progress depends on openness, transparency and the free flow of ideas.” While this is true in a sense, it is quite false when the U.S. is in an open competition with a geo-strategic rival that is stealing billions of dollars per annum in proprietary technological research.
While there are many advocates of international education and open exchange, in this newly unfolding multi-polar world, where Great Power competition has once again taken the fore, an adjusted approach to international education must be enacted to match the new realities of technological competition.
Thus, a techno-cultural battle for the intellectual soul of the world—the pursuit of truth and free inquiry—is at stake.
Yang Guangbin, who teaches at Renmin University in Beijing, points out that the West won the Cold War without resorting to gunpowder and that many countries were subverted, thereby highlighting the importance of ideological warfare. Professor Guangbin continues:
The world is not only material but also a conceptual construction … what the world looks like depends on what people look at and what concepts they use to analyze it. No power is greater than the kind of power that can manipulate thoughts and ideas.
Former University of Moscow Professor Alexandar Dugin, labeled the most dangerous philosopher in the world, coined the term Noomkakhia, which holds that the field of thinking is the field of warfare, “as thoughts wage ceaseless wars not only against phenomenality matter and their own reorganization into elements … but also against other types of thoughts.”
In the coming years, China will seek to redefine the mental models and mindsets of the global South through the exportation of its 6G technology, intelligent campuses, and digital education initiatives, thereby selecting, directing, and shaping the minds of billions. History will be manufactured and updated in real time in these Huawei-operated, educated institutions—much like it has in China—to vilify the West, and all information will be controlled to further the CCP’s grand strategy of world domination.
When Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai met with Henry Kissinger during the opening of China in 1972, he asked Zhou, “Do you think the enlightenment will succeed?” Zhou replied, “it is too early to tell.”
Both statesmen understood the importance of cultural worldviews and the battle to control the intellectual perceptions of the global system. Yet neither, perhaps, understood that in the future, the next battle for geopolitical supremacy would not only be above ground, in the form of commanders and soldiers, but also underground, in the form of fiber-optic cables and system administrators.
China understands that it must win the war of minds in order to win the war of the world, and that it must win the battle of technology to defeat America.
China’s president Xi Jinping, however, clearly understands the importance of technological mastery in this new Great Game, and this is precisely why he requested that Trump continue to permit Chinese students to study here in the U.S., even as the CCP shifts to new methods of technological acquisition and theft.
This indicates that the U.S. still holds the edge in STEM fields, but this edge is diminishing at an alarming rate as Chinese STEM students continue to spy and steal from America’s most esteemed and prestigious universities.
While government officials, financial firms, tech corporations, and university administrators may have claimed naivete several decades ago, it is now beyond a reasonable doubt that continued collaboration with China in the STEM fields is against the national interest.
The main problem here, however, is not national interest, but rather financial interest. Universities, much like corporations, seek to expand their bottom line, and if mandates are not passed banning such collaboration in full, business will continue as usual—and business is indeed continuing as usual.
At a meeting in the Oval Office on August 25 with the South Korean president, Donald Trump stated that he was “honored” to host Chinese students, noting that they help universities stay afloat. With Marco Rubio seated nearby, Trump added:
President Xi would like me to come to China. It’s a very important relationship … I hear so many stories about ‘we are not going to allow their students,’ but we are going to allow their students to come in. We are going to allow it. It’s very important—600,000 students.
This recent development does not bode well for America’s goal of AI supremacy, as it places the very technological training and know-how in the hands of its arch-rival, enabling China to defeat the U.S. in the AI race.
China understands that it must win the war of minds in order to win the war of the world, and that it must win the battle of technology to defeat America.
While the physical infrastructure and hard power of armies, ships, and drones have attracted considerable attention, the new great game will not be fought over land, but for technological control and the shifting of the American-based standards and norms that have been in place since the end of World War II. As Chinese students continue to flood into American institutions of higher education, domestic students lose, the American economy fails, and our technological competitiveness diminishes.
Under Mao, China stood up, under Deng, it grew wealthy, and under Xi, it has grown strong.
China is now strong enough to challenge the United States and its dominance in higher education, doing so by exporting digital campuses, intelligent universities, and cognitive city models. If China succeeds, it will no longer be a matter of the teacher being taught, but rather, the teacher being effectively bought.
Image: “Xi Jinping” by Пресс-служба Президента Российской Федерации on Wikimedia Commons
