US visa restrictions ‘necessary but don’t affect many Chinese students’

Name: Overseas education no longer a sure route to success in China
Uploaded: 2021-07-08T10:34:58.000Z
Duration: 2 min 58 s
Description: Overseas education no longer a sure route to success in China

Embassy spokesman in Beijing says most young scholars are welcome in the United States

Comments latest in row amid accusations China is exploiting US technology for defence purposes via its youth studying there

Reading Time:3 minutes

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Chinese students in New York graduating in 2018. More than 370,000 Chinese students were in the US during the 2019-20 academic year. A small percentage of youngsters have been denied visas in recent months due to US worries they could be a security risk. Photo: Xinhua

Amber Wangin Beijing

Published: 6:34pm, 8 Jul 2021Updated: 12:05am, 9 Jul 2021

Visa restrictions imposed by the United States on Chinese students affect just a small number of applicants and are needed to prevent China exploiting advanced US technology for its own ends, according to a US statement on Thursday.

It is the latest development in a row between the two nations over young people the US believes pose a potential security risk. A spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing said Washington still welcomes Chinese students who do not further China’s efforts to modernise its military.

He said the visa restrictions relate to less than 2 per cent of the overall number of Chinese students and exchange visitor visa applicants. He gave no further details on numbers.

Given that there were apparently more than 370,000 Chinese students in the US in the 2019-20 academic year, thousands of people could potentially be affected.

“The MCF-affiliated graduate students and research scholars subject to this policy represent a small subset of the total number of Chinese students and scholars coming to the United States,” the spokesman said, in an emailed response to the South China Morning Post.

02:58

Overseas education no longer a sure route to success in China

China’s MCF – military-civil fusion – strategy aims to see private sector and state-owned military-industrial players working together on technology to help modernise the nation’s defence forces.

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