Court decision barring Chinese student sends message about espionage risk
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Chinese students who want to study this topic in the US face extreme scrutiny in visa interviews. On cursory inspection, there is a logic there.
The logic falls apart when you realize that all academic research is intended to be published. We don’t develop secret IP or trade secrets[1]. Our development offices want us to obtain patents on our work, but that is another form of publication.
I wish the powers that are moving to stigmatize Chinese academics would be clearer why they are doing it.
If they are concerned that students are using a student visa as a cover story for traditional espionage (cultivating assets, etc) they should say so.
If they are doing it in an attempt to starve China of trained workers in cutting edge tech, like they are with chip bans, I wish they would say so.
But claiming this is about “IP theft” makes it unclear if these efforts are pretextual or if our national security apparatus legitimately doesn’t understand the basics of how universities work.
[1] Some labs do classified work, but are limited to cleared citizens.
Isn’t that the whole point of sending students on exchange?
Would it have made a difference if the visa application allowed a student to stay in Canada indefinitely, and not go “back to China”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in_t...
Many of these individuals were naturalized or given permeant residence. Many of them were in areas of medical research.
This isn't only "steal stuff and send it to China" but also "become a researcher, get grants, partner with lab in China and send them the grant money." For example:
> In May 2021, Dr. Song Guo Zheng, an Ohio resident and rheumatology professor/researcher with "strong ties to China" was sentenced to 37 months in prison and ordered to pay over $3.8 million in restitution to the NIH and Ohio State University (at which Zheng formerly led a research team) after being convicted of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his ties to China. He had, before his sentencing, pleaded guilty to lying on NIH grant applications to spend funds helping develop China's immunology and rheumatology expertise. Zheng had lied about and hidden his connection to China's Thousand Talents Plan, which the FBI described as "a program established by the Chinese government to recruit individuals with knowledge or access to foreign technology intellectual property."
I really can't think of any instance in industrial history where a leading power just gave away their core technology. America had to steal textile technology from Britain (see the great book 'Smuggler Nation' (2013, Peter Andreas) [1] on that); Britain and France had to steal chemical technology from Germany (after WWI, that was a significant cause of tension as the British and French raided German manufacturing centers for blueprints and recipes) - but with China, the USA's financial oligarchs just gave them the factories because they wanted to destroy domestic unions and thereby raise their profit margins.
All these efforts to use intellectual property and espionage laws to roll it all back are doomed to failure, it's a classic case of trying to close the barn door after all the animals have escaped. Not only that, a knock-on effect is that the decades of lowered investment in domestic manufacturing infrastructure in the USA, has put the entire country in a backwards position (note how we can't even maintain our aging rail network, let alone build high-speed rail networks like China has).
If you want someone to blame, the architects and champions of neoliberal trade policies and the financialization of the US economy are the ones responsible for this debacle.
In context this makes it sound like Britain and France had little or no chemical industry before the end of WWI which is obvious nonsense. Germany had a significant edge there, and the victors took advantage of the aftermath to get a leg up, but it wasn’t a revolution like the original US or more recent Chinese industrial buildout.
Context for others: What you are referring to is the principle of consular nonreviewability <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consular_nonreviewability> in the US; I would have thought Canada has something equivalent, but I suppose not based on this case.
With hindsight the West might have made a lot of mistakes with how China was engaged. There should have been more serious negotiation to make liberalising their political system part of the package when they got all that investment back in the 90s. Doesn't even need to be any compromise on the Chinese part, just some consensus between the west and the PRC that it shouldn't be a tiny handful of people running the whole show and that this reality should be obvious to everyone. It was a mistake not to be more culturally assertive about making their decision making more transparent and their military governance more democratic. It has been unhelpful to make it all just business dealings.
These are very common. The NYPD and FBI have just now starting busting them up.
Many people don’t know this since they think the the USA’s late imperial citizenship model is universal, but the Chinese state claims global jurisdiction over all Chinese persons and they don’t determine who is a Chinese person on the basis of papers issued by foreign governments.
We always knew that, and they always knew that too.
Until recently, we considered this not a factor, because most Chinese students would stay in the US or come back later, so we could get a constant flow of highly trained individuals with most of their training having been financed by someone else.
Now things are changing, globalization is being reverted, and the benefit equation has changed, because now, as those students get back to China, it is now us the ones financing the fixed costs of the educational infrastructure to benefit China.
He's not being denied that because anyone objects to his aims. The problem seems to be his parents, culture and where his family comes from. Now I'll agree with you that the standard for racism is a bit fuzzy these days, but this is clearly going to meet the bar for being called "racist" when it comes to a university education in North America.
These is this entity called the People's Republic of China that is independent of Chinese people culture. That entity is the problem here.
The problem aren't his parents, but the known history of what his government may do to his parents to force him to comply, and yes, the culture that normalized this sort of thing as being ok. You're seriously reaching by calling this racism. Even if "universities" might call it that, that doesn't make the classification sensible or coherent.
- A Taiwanese student
- A Chinese student who grew up in America?
- A Chinese student who grew up in Canada?
- A Chinese student from a Chinese family that immigrated to Mexico?
No? The ethnicities and race are similar for all the above cases. And I don’t think anyone doubts Canada would them in. Showing - race has nothing to do with this equation.
Also, in many ways, it is possibly a mercy to the Chinese student himself; because then he won’t be put in a situation where the Chinese government puts his family (quite literally) at gunpoint.
The more experienced I get, the more I'm convinced the "this should(n't) be obvious" part is the main differentiator between the American and the Chinese system