As tensions with China rise, scientists at America’s leading universities complain of stalled research after crackdown at airports
Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered. ⠀
Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023. The embassy said it had complained to the US authorities about each case. ⠀
“The impact is huge,” says Qin Yan, a professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, who says that he is aware of more than a dozen Chinese students from Yale and other universities who have been rejected by the US in recent months, despite holding valid visas. Experiments have stalled, and there is a “chilling effect” for the next generation of Chinese scientists. ⠀
The refusals appear to be linked to a 2020 US rule that barred Chinese postgraduate students with links to China’s “military-civil fusion strategy”, which aims to leverage civilian infrastructure to support military development. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinktank estimates that 95 civilian universities in China have links to the defence sector.
Nearly 2,000 visas applications were rejected on that basis in 2021. But now people who pass the security checks necessary to be granted a visa by the State Department are being turned away at the border by CBP, a different branch of government.
“It is very hard for a CBP officer to really evaluate the risk of espionage,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts, who represents a graduate student at Yale who, midway through her PhD, was sent back from Washington’s Dulles airport in December, and banned from re-entering the US for five years. ⠀
Academics say that scrutiny has widened to different fields – particularly medical sciences – with the reasons for the refusals not made clear.
Interesting! I just assumed because communist states like Cuba and China have higher life expectancies than the US that the USSR would too, I guess I didn’t consider how much less developed they were than modern communist states.
China does have a higher life expectancy than the US, but still a lower one than most other capitalist nations. You are wrong about Cuba, it still has a lower life expectancy.
Newsweek, 2022: Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans
That article needs an update. It compares US life expectancy in 2021, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, to Cuba’s 2020 numbers. An apples-to-apples comparison shows that for 2021, Cuba was a little below the US. That’s fine, of course, that’s very good performance, especially considering the embargo. Note that the China numbers I included do not include the effects of ending the strict lockdown policy.