The United States will start “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
The announcement is the latest move in the Trump administration’s campaign against U.S. universities and international students in particular, after it revoked thousands of students’ visas, detained or deported other students over political activism and sought to bar international students from enrolling at Harvard University.
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Rubio said in a statement that visa criteria would also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
“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,” he said.
China said Friday that the U.S. was “unjustifiably” canceling Chinese student visas “under the pretext of ideology and national security.”
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“This politically discriminatory move exposes the hypocrisy of America’s long-proclaimed values of freedom and openness, and will only further damage the United States’ international image and credibility,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a regular briefing in Beijing.
NBC News reported Tuesday that the Trump administration had stopped scheduling new interviews for foreign nationals seeking visas to study in the United States, citing an internal State Department cable. The cable said the suspension was in preparation for expanded social media screening of applicants.
China is the second-biggest source of international students in the United States after India, though numbers have been dropping in recent years amid growing U.S.-China tensions and disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic.
About 277,000 Chinese students were in the United States in the 2023-24 academic year, down from a peak of more than 370,000 in 2019. By contrast, there were only about 800 Americans studying in China last year, down from a peak of about 15,000 in 2014.
Though Rubio did not specify what he meant by “critical fields,” both the U.S. and China are concerned about each other’s advancements in strategically sensitive areas such as biotechnology, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.