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Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

bloomberg.com

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Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#41

Post by caminante »

macintux wrote: post #11
warmcat wrote: post #8

"In April, three researchers were also let go by the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in connection with an investigation into possible foreign attempts to take advantage of its federally funded research." This is the real reason why visas are getting denied. Why would you want to enjoy the fruits of living and working in America but benefit other countries (even if you once belonged there)?

I must admit to some confusion about why federally-funded cancer research results aren’t available to everyone.

The issue isn't collaboration or information-sharing.

The researchers didn't disclose affiliations and violated non-disclosures. Those are pure ethics violations (and conflicts of interest) that undermine research integrity. If they're willing to lie there, what else are they willing to lie about?

Quote from another article:

> The reports say that the researchers failed to disclose international collaborators and that at least one confidential grant application was sent to a scientist in China in violation of federal policy, among other allegations. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/health/md-anderson-chines...

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#42

Post by gojomo »

hurrdurr2 wrote: post #21
gojomo wrote: post #14

This tactic could sorta make sense – if narrowly directed at "princelings" who are children of top officials, rather than top students we'd love to have stay in the US. (I don't have much hope clumsy trade/immigration bureaucracies & grandstanding politicians can be that subtle, though.)

All this anti-China activity almost reminds me of the "yellow peril" at the turn of the last century...

There's enough mutual affinity, interchange, & commerce that this current political/trade spat hasn't had much of a racial character, in its rhetoric or reasoning, as far as I've seen.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#43

Post by hurrdurr2 »

wavefunction wrote: post #40
hurrdurr2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this anti-China activity almost reminds me of the "yellow peril" at the turn of the last century...

I would agree except that it's one hundred years later and there are Uighur re-education camps and social credit scores and new islands in the South China Sea with missile platforms and statements about reconquering Taiwan and... well.

.. and during that time what has the US done? Throwing Japanese Americans into internment camps, overthrew legitimate governments and installing dictators who ran death squads, operated black sites around the world that tortured detainees... the list goes on.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#44

Post by educationdata »

Let's get the fact straight: most scholars from China always consider themselves as Chinese nationals even after they have lived in the U.S. for decades, after they get green card, and even after they get the U.S. citizenship. This fact creates a serious national security threat for the U.S.

The U.S. government has treated scholars from China with great openness and trust, and this trust has been abused by too many Chinese scholars. It is extremely common among Chinese scholars to take a full-time position in China while they are already full-time employees in the U.S. They hide their Chinese employment from their U.S. employers, and hide their Chinese income from the U.S. government, and they directly take their research funded by the U.S. government to their Chinese labs, and they hire Chinese students from their Chinese labs to work in their U.S. lab, and they train those Chinese students with U.S. government funding and then send them to work in their Chinese labs, and etc. etc. etc. They take advantage of the U.S. system for their personal gains.

The U.S. government needs to seriously address this issue. The starting point should be checking through each one of those recruited in the Thousand Talents Program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Chin...

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#45

Post by rgbrenner »

nneonneo wrote: post #9

Students from China (and many other countries) are required to renew their visas annually, a process which is already quite nerve-wracking for many. PhDs in particular can take anywhere from 4 to 8 years to complete, meaning 4-8 chances for your studies to be interrupted with the only option to return home while the visa renewal stalls. This article explicitly calls out the fact that renewals seem to have been gettin…

Already, science budgets are continually slashed and grants are harder to find.

The first point is false. R&D spending is at a record high: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf Government's share of funding has fallen below 50%, but only because business r&d spending has increased so much. Federal R&D budgets are increasing: https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/US-science-fundi...

If the 2nd part is true, it's only because the amount of proposals is growing faster than the funding.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#46

Post by TehCorwiz »

jtr_47 wrote: post #36
analog31 wrote: post #25

I was a grad student when the Tienanmen Square demonstrations happened. Chinese students in the US formed the backbone of a network that maintained communication with their compatriots in China. I personally think that welcoming international students and treating them with goodwill is good foreign policy.

[flagged]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#47

Post by tntn »

ekianjo wrote: post #38
nneonneo wrote: post #9

Students from China (and many other countries) are required to renew their visas annually, a process which is already quite nerve-wracking for many. PhDs in particular can take anywhere from 4 to 8 years to complete, meaning 4-8 chances for your studies to be interrupted with the only option to return home while the visa renewal stalls. This article explicitly calls out the fact that renewals seem to have been gettin…

> . If they further hamstring themselves by excluding Chinese students, the decline of American science will accelerate dramatically it is a strange assumption to make since by all counts the US is already the country in the world with the most diverse population. It is not as if science is only the work of students or even in particular foreign students...

60-80% of graduate students in STEM fields in the U.S. are international students. It seems like having 60-80% fewer graduates would accelerate the decline of American science.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#48

Post by _bxg1 »

analog31 wrote: post #25

I was a grad student when the Tienanmen Square demonstrations happened. Chinese students in the US formed the backbone of a network that maintained communication with their compatriots in China. I personally think that welcoming international students and treating them with goodwill is good foreign policy.

Agreed. Hopefully this move really is limited to those "with ties to Beijing", and not simply all Chinese people.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#49

Post by henrikschroder »

ekianjo wrote: post #38
nneonneo wrote: post #9

Students from China (and many other countries) are required to renew their visas annually, a process which is already quite nerve-wracking for many. PhDs in particular can take anywhere from 4 to 8 years to complete, meaning 4-8 chances for your studies to be interrupted with the only option to return home while the visa renewal stalls. This article explicitly calls out the fact that renewals seem to have been gettin…

> . If they further hamstring themselves by excluding Chinese students, the decline of American science will accelerate dramatically it is a strange assumption to make since by all counts the US is already the country in the world with the most diverse population. It is not as if science is only the work of students or even in particular foreign students...

The US has a massive advantage in science (and business) in that many of the best and brightest from across the world want to come to the US, despite the hurdles and issues of getting student visas or work visas.

This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people, but you get to reap the rewards of them working in your country and contributing to your scientific lead, to your economy.

But like all advantages, if you don't pay attention, you can squander it. You can make it easy for smart Chinese students (in this instance) to do science in the US and benefit US academia and businesses, or you can make it hard, and the same people will instead benefit some other economy.

It's not about diversity, it's about not realizing that the free firehose of cheap and willing smarts and labour isn't perpetual, that it actually has to be maintained and encouraged.

Re: Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

#50

Post by vuln »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #46
jtr_47 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

There have been some reports regarding Chinese students being spies.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/us-intelligence-chin...

https://www.wired.com/story/china-spy-recruitment-us/

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