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On Sunday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Gu, a 22-year-old Chinese philosophy student, was deported back to China from a Texas airport mere hours after his arrival. The AP painted him as a starry-eyed scholar whose American dream was stomped out on the tarmac. But buried at the end of the story are facts that complicate AP’s “poor student” narrative: Gu is a member of the Communist Youth League—the Chinese Communist Party’s official training ground—and his phone contained communications referencing the China Scholarship Council, the government body that bankrolls most Chinese students in the U.S., especially those aligned with the Ministry of State Security. Those aren’t throwaway facts; they’re red flags. AP may not think that justifies deportation, but it absolutely does. Still, Gu’s case isn’t really about him—it’s a window into the Trump administration’s erratic, flip-flopping approach to Chinese students. Will America keep sending back potential spies? That, for now, is anyone’s guess.
Just three months ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students, signaling a hard-line stance against potential espionage. Now, in yet another whiplash moment, President Trump has declared his intent to admit 600,000 Chinese students—more than double the current enrollment of about 277,000—after a request from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Minding the Campus contributor Chris Crandall noted that Xi’s request shows just how much Beijing values a VIP pass into American universities, making Trump’s about-face all the more puzzling and raising questions about his administration’s coherence and commitment to its own “America First” rhetoric.
Trump defends this pivot on two grounds: economics and diplomacy. Economically, he argues that Chinese students are essential to keeping American colleges alive, with nearly 100 institutions closing or merging in the 2023–2024 academic year amid declining enrollment caused by a shrinking U.S. birthrate and Americans’ low trust in higher education. (Confidence has ticked up slightly, but most Americans still say they have low confidence in colleges and universities.) Diplomatically, Trump framed the decision as a gesture to avoid “insulting” Beijing, telling the Daily Caller that keeping ties cordial with a nuclear-armed adversary is better than stirring the pot. And then there’s the transactional part: Trump wants China’s rare earth minerals. Never mind that the United States already has its own supply—“we have these minerals, but let’s bend over backwards for theirs” is not exactly a winning slogan.
[RELATED: Trump Has Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Chinese Students]
So, neither of Trump’s rationales holds up.
Take the economic argument. To be clear, I don’t buy into conservative “let the market sort it out” orthodoxy. But Trump—and Republicans generally—claim to. And by propping up failing colleges with foreign tuition dollars, he’s betraying the very free-market principles he and his whole party claim to defend. As economist Richard Vedder argues, struggling colleges should be allowed to fail. Giving universities the advantage of relying on foreign students only normalizes their outrageous and inefficient ways of operating. They’ll keep assuming that someone will pay to keep them afloat. If they want to survive, they should do so by cutting bloat and figuring out how to streamline education for Americans—not by being handed a government lifeline from the Trump administration to prop up their inefficiency.
The diplomatic rationale isn’t much better. As my colleague Kali Jerrard quipped, Trump’s policy rolls out the “welcome mat” for potential spies, trading long-term national security for short-term optics with Xi. We all want diplomacy, sure, but China’s version of diplomacy is to smile while picking your pocket.
As president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), Peter Wood recently described, the CCP has long used American universities to “pick flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China.” Minding the Campus and the NAS have documented how Chinese students, often affiliated with the Communist Youth League or the China Scholarship Council, are required by Chinese law to report back to Beijing. Many end up in sensitive labs with military applications, quietly funneling knowledge home. (Read NAS’s China and Our Children).
And it’s not just technology theft. Beijing also uses colleges and universities to shape U.S. policy. Take Tsinghua University’s Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which partners with UC Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute. In 2023, California even signed its own climate agreement with China—skating dangerously close to constitutional prohibitions on states conducting foreign policy. Partnerships like these masquerade as benign academic exchanges, but as Ian Oxnevad has reported, they’re part of a broader strategy of influencing U.S. policy, shaping it in a way that favors China. Add to that China’s espionage operations—like the “Salt Typhoon” campaign that targeted UCLA, California State University, Loyola Marymount University, Utah Tech, and others to steal intellectual property in telecommunications and engineering—and the risks are obvious. Importing more Chinese students doesn’t just help Beijing steal secrets; it expands the attack surface for cyber campaigns.
[RELATED: Xi’s Secret Weapon? U.S. Higher Education]
The Biden administration already made this worse by killing Trump’s China Initiative in 2022, a program that was designed to counter academic espionage. Why was it canceled? Political optics, maybe. Calling out Chinese espionage was smeared as “racist.” But it was more likely killed because of compromises tied to Hunter Biden’s China-linked business deals. Whatever the reason, the move created a vacuum that CCP-affiliated actors have eagerly exploited. The irony is that Trump, who claims to distinguish himself from Biden on China policy, is now heading down the same path of weakness.
Beyond espionage, the labor market effect is real. Foreign students trained in the United States often stay through the H-1B visa program, filling roles in critical industries—including those with major defense contracts. Amazon Web Services, with $20 billion in defense contracts, employs H-1B workers on projects vital to national security. Meta, flagged for CCP ties, and Oracle, which has supported Chinese surveillance infrastructure used against the Uyghurs, also rely on this talent pipeline. Somehow Palantir appears saintly in contrast. Astonishingly, American policymakers pretend this is normal while pushing to expand it. The real reason, I suspect, is that business leaders—and the Republicans who take their calls—put ROI above national security. (Read American Security Project’s CODE WAR: How China’s AI Ambitions Threaten U.S. National Security)
Equally troubling, by training Chinese students here, we’re supercharging China’s own universities. If these graduates don’t stay in the U.S., they return home armed with knowledge that strengthens Beijing’s institutions and fuels its authoritarian agenda. Schools like Tsinghua and Peking, for example, are not neutral bastions of learning—they are extensions of the CCP.
And its educational institutions are growing stronger. Its Schwarzman Scholars program brings Americans and other internationals to Beijing, under a curriculum tightly managed by the CCP. The FBI has questioned students returning from such programs, concerned they were recruited as tools of the Party. This is not unlike America’s own history of using universities to normalize Western values and spread democracy—an effort I think was naïve, if not hubristic. But at least the U.S. was trying—allegedly—to spread liberty. Beijing, by contrast, is openly pushing the CCP’s agenda on the world, waging a battle of ideas that stands in direct opposition to Western values.
So the stakes of Trump’s latest flip-flop go far beyond geopolitics—they’re civilizational.
Flooding our universities with Chinese students doesn’t just risk losing an edge in artificial intelligence or quantum computing; it also undermines Western education, weakens our own workforce, props up failing institutions that shouldn’t be saved, and enriches a rival power bent on censorship and control.
This isn’t just about national security. Setting spying aside, allowing a strategic rival to enter our educational institutions—sometimes with taxpayer subsidies (why, for example, did Gu receive a full ride?)—does not serve Americans. Our colleges and universities should serve Americans first, developing our students and protecting our intellectual capital. Rigorous vetting—and yes, deportations—aren’t cruel. What’s cruel is pretending we can hand Beijing the keys to our campuses and expect no consequences.
Trump needs to get a grip, provide a consistent policy, and stop betraying the very “America First” promises that propelled him into office.
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Image: “President Trump Travels to Texas” by the Trump White House on Flickr
