There is no such thing as modern Chinese meritocracy.
As we've seen with the recent scandals (and we also knew before), the wealthiest American attendees are hardly America's best minds either.
Don't think this is a problem that only applies to foreign students. If you want to remove wealth advantages for top tier universities I'm all for it, but it's a bad club to use in this debate.
I've been in programming and systems administration my whole working life, and I've been working in departments that are about half foreign born for most of that time. It's always a kinda weird cultural clash at first, as I look and sound, uh, a little bit midwestern; I've never left the country, and I have zero formal education and come from a family I'd call middle class (outside the bay area middle class) And then you get these very cosmopolitan foreign born people who almost always have advanced degrees working alongside me.
My impression is pretty different from yours. My impression is that, yeah, a lot of these people were raised rich and powerful by the standards of where they came from, and many have the social defects you see in Americans who had serving staff as children. But... generally speaking? they meet or exceed the same technical standards everyone else does for the job. I mean, interviewing is hard, and sometimes they get one that isn't any good, but that's true of all people of all national origins. interviewing is hard, and you make mistakes in both directions, and have to correct later.
Now, I didn't go to school; I don't know if those that aren't any good get failed out in school, or if they don't pass the interview... but I will stand by my statement that if you put in the effort to understand the accents, these foreign students aren't worse than US born candidates. And even if we're just talking about communication, foreign born people I've worked with who were educated at US schools all wrote better than the average US-born person in the same role. I assume that was something the US schools either filtered on or taught well.
I'm just saying; my experience is that these people, one way or another, got themselves some serious education and passed a fairly high intelligence bar, too. There's no way that these are China's minds with the most potential, but they might be among China's best educated minds, and that ain't nothin'
(As an aside, I certainly agree that you overlook a lot of good people if the first step in your filtering process is "has wealthy parents." both China and the US has serious problems with wasting good minds that happen to be born to parents who aren't wealthy. That this has been true for all of history doesn't excuse the truth.)
Is closer to then original coinage than you might think. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/792606.The_Rise_of_the_M...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
Wealthy Americans can and have bought their way into Harvard, Stanford et. al. left and right.
You can say what you like about "best minds" but I can assure you there are some seriously talented Chinese youth coming to the US for grad school and then ending up at top American companies and working jobs where high intelligence and ability is required. I was friends with many of said graduate students and many of them expressed fear and sadness about the Trump Visa situation and none of them wanted to go back to China.
>"I believe that if people stoped[sic] using or subscribing to @ATT, they would be forced to make big changes at @CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway. It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News! Why wouldn’t they act. When the World watches @CNN, it gets a false picture of USA. Sad!"
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2019
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11354990026261544...
What the US gets out of that is also unclear.
I guess you could just take at face value this proposition by the US President that boycotting AT&T to enforce large changes in the editorial policy of CNN is something that is good for the US. But I think that you would also have to be very careful not to think about it very hard.
It gets the media landscape in-line with the administration: "Don't you dare to report badly about me or I will make you pay for it.", at least it attempts to.
Corollary: it's more prestigious to have done your bachelor's education at Tsinghua University than at MIT or Harvard. The top students in China do their Bachelor's degree in China. The ones who don't get into the top universities and have money are sent overseas.
Tsinghua in Beijing is one of the world's foremost universities. A ton of Chinese leaders and also two Nobel laureates come from there.
It matters if they return to China with their American education and:
-engage in nation-state attacks on behalf of the PLA [1], or
-build facial-recognition software to further repress the Uyghur community [2], or
-contribute to the "social credit" system which makes it next-to-impossible for everyday Chinese to express anything other than unvarnished support of the ruling party [3], or
-eavesdrop on advocates for democracy in Hong Kong [4], or
-build advanced weapons systems that are then installed on newly-constructed islands in the South China Sea [5], or
-conduct industrial espionage on behalf of Chinese companies with key government contacts or PLA-connected C-level execs [6], or
-participate in advanced research projects like quantum satellites which could give China a persistent strategic advantage against the NSA [7], or
-install facial recognition technology in primary-school and middle-school classrooms to enhance indoctrination methods at an earlier age [8], or
-any other number of future scenarios we haven't even discussed.
I'm not saying every overseas Chinese student fits this description. While living in Shanghai for almost 6 years, I encountered quite a few that were open to democratic ideals and skeptical of their government's propaganda. However, there is also a non-trivial amount of nationalism among everyday Chinese, and the CCP is capable of directing it against the US anytime it sees fit, through its monopoly of mainland media outlets (and increasingly, non-mainland ones as well) [9].
I don't pretend to have a solution to this problem. But I think it may be short-sighted to expect Chinese students to be wooed by the wonders of democracy after a short-term study-abroad program in a country whose democracy is flawed at best.
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Sources:
[1] https://www.cbronline.com/what-is/what-is-pla-unit-61398-and...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/11/china-hi-tech-w...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_China#Hon...
[5] https://futurism.com/the-byte/australia-chinese-lasers-milit...
[6] https://www.globaldots.com/chinese-spying-chips-found-hidden...
[7] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/china-s-quantum-sate...
[8] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-school-facial-recognit...
[9] https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/speak-no-evi...
When discussing foreign policy officials and visa rules, Orwell is probably going to come up fairly regularly as a common point of reference. Is from the book 1984.
1984
For a more overt manifestation, just take a look at how the US treats ex-convicts: Public shaming by releasing mug-shots, some states even revoking their right to vote among other rights, de-facto turning them into second-grade citizens for life.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/12/03/air-travel-surveillance-...
I think some readers of my original comment may be misunderstanding it. To clarify, I am happy to go into an equal level of detail about the many ills of American hegemony:
-False claims about WMD as a pretext for war against Iraq, resulting in an estimated 460,000 deaths [1]
-Four centuries of slave trade, which forced millions of people into bondage, resulted in a number of deaths ranging from 1.5 million to 5 million people, tore countless families apart, and continues to have socioeconomic consequences to this day, both in America and Africa. [2]
-The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during WWII, which indiscriminately targeted civilians and killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki. [3]
-Countless examples of backing authoritarian rulers friendly to US interests and engaging in "regime change", including the 1953 Iran coup [4], Fulgencio Basista in Cuba [5], and currently supporting 73% of regimes classified as "dictatorships" by Freedom House. [6]
-The idea of "manifest destiny" [7] as a justification to lay claim to territory that was already occupied, resulting in the deaths of 80-98% of native peoples as the result of diseases like smallpox, as well as outright genocide. [8]
-American involvement in the Vietnam War, which killed between 1-4 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. [9]
-Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and so-called "black sites", where non-US citizens are held without trial and subject to human rights abuses. [10]
-Mass surveillance conducted by the US government, including on its own people, resulting in an unknowable number of civil liberties violations. [11]
I mention all of the above in order to (hopefully) establish the fact that I am not simply "reading off the script of the two minutes hate." Or if I am, at least I'm reading off both sides' scripts.
That said, my original point still stands. I obviously have no data on the percentage of visa applicants who plan to use their education for ill vs good. In fact, I'm even willing to stipulate that the vast majority of those applicants fall into the more well-intentioned category. However, _if_ (and this is a big if) the intention of a student visa applicant is to commit acts which (hopefully) we can all agree are antithetical to basic human rights, and _if_ an American education would make them relatively more effective at doing so, then we all have an interest in stopping them from succeeding. That is true regardless of whether they do so on behalf of the CCP, the US government, a private corporation, etc. And importantly, whether there are American analogues to China's actions has no bearing on this point. It's pure whatabout-ism, and is a distraction from the point at hand.
I'm emphatically _not_ advocating for the repeal of student visas for Chinese applicants (I personally think this is a bad idea overall). I'm simply responding to another reader's question, "does it matter (if visa applicants study in the US or elsewhere)?". The point I'm making is that it might matter very much, and that exposure to or immersion in American democracy is not a panacea, especially when that democracy has significant and chronic ills which prevent it from reaching its full potential.
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Sources
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
2) https://www.un.org/en/events/africandescentdecade/slave-trad...
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18...
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
6) https://truthout.org/articles/us-provides-military-assistanc...
7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...
9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_United_States_in_t...
10) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...
11) https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...