Chinese students in US tell of 'chilling' interrogations and deportations | Hacker News Reader

Chinese students in US tell of 'chilling' interrogations and deportations

theguardian.com

44 pointsnkurz50 comments

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Don't really see why that's surprising.

If you are from:

- China

- Russia

- Iran

- North-Korea

- Pakistan

And some other countries, you should absolutely expect full to be under full scrutiny if you plan on working with anything related to research and development (which includes academia), infrastructure, or anything that poses a national security risk.

The cold hard truth is that (especially) those nations send operatives and assets to western countries, for the single reason of espionage and intelligence gathering. This is such a known problem that said countries tend to send their people via proxy countries.

Of course, these agencies and people are not amateurs - and blending in by the numbers is just one way to make it harder to get caught, and unfortunately means legitimate people will have a harder time to get in.

Indeed, two years age a researcher was arrested in Norway; he claimed he was Brazilian but the security services had identified him as a Russian spy

https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/spionsiktet-gjesteforsker-1.16157...

Interesting that you added Pakistan to the list, have they ever been accused of espionage in the US? Or trying to hack anyone for sensitive information? Doesn't seem likely.

Have any reference to this?

I'm only seeing them in reference to India which would seem par for the course on both sides.

Pakistan stole nuclear secrets from Netherlands, and then sold them to North Korea (in exchange for ballistic missile technology), Libya and Iran. The nuclear arsenals of all rogue nations threatening armageddon today (other than Russia) were midwifed by Pakistan.

Sources:

1. https://archive.ph/EgTF0

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070701103529/http://www.pakist...

Here in The Netherlands there was a big scandal in the 70s concerning Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadir Khan who worked in a nuclear research lab and was accused of being a spy. He's regarded as the 'father' of the Pakistani atom bomb.

And later sold the technology to North Korea if I remember correctly.

[1] Illegal nuclear proliferation

[2] Potential terrorism, it is a breeding ground for it. Lot of past perpetrators got training, planned it there or had some connection.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-men-indicted-operating-i...

[2] Lot of Wikipedia pages on Pakistani involvement in terror attacks on US: San Bernardino shooting, aaifa siddiqui case, support for OBL etc

It's not surprise. It's concerning. Innocent people are paying for policies they have no control over.

https://www.voanews.com/amp/us-beijing-aim-to-boost-number-o...

These days, only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of close to 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at U.S. schools.

To add just a bit of context.

I’m sure that foreign students have no restrictions placed on entry to the country, places visited nor are there any restrictions on topics studied or on publication or research.

https://www.voanews.com/amp/british-documentary-alleges-chin...

I wonder how much of that is due to Covid, but I remember some stat like the number of people learning Chinese since 2008 was down at least 50% even before Covid, and that includes people studying in their home country.

The covid response by China's authoritarian dreamers is what did it.

Yeah, I was there for three months right before the end of restrictions. Not very excited to go back after that.

> only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese

This is ~100% COVID

https://www.statista.com/statistics/374169/china-number-of-s...

Australia had the same lockdowns as China, but because they had remote learning it didn't change a lot - https://www.statista.com/statistics/430276/number-of-chinese...

Education is Australia biggest export after selling their dirt from their massive continent (75% of the USA with 8% of the pop) - https://thekoalanews.com/education-as-an-export-for-australi...

Why China is allowing it's citizens be propagandized by living their formative years in free democracies is crazy. They should have stopped their students leaving after COVID.

We should make the most of Xi mistake, or get ready for war and keep sanctioning them and their products. Just chose a direction.

> Why China is allowing it's citizens be propagandized by living their formative years in free democracies is crazy.

Honestly, many of the kids studying here look down their nose at the US and its people. They will have fun here, but many are in isolated bubbles with other Chinese students and don't befriend others.

VOA being referenced unironically?

It's surprising how few Chinese people study in America. With a population 1/14th of America, Australia has 150,000 Chinese students.

The US entry refusals should be familiar fare to Chinese citizens though, as their Govt employs stochastic enforcement all the time, including for censorship and as part of trade disputes.

It sucks for the individuals, but this really isn't about them, it's about the CCP and it's ongoing campaign of industrial espionage and global surveillance.

It is likely a number of 'students' were also part of the diaspora surveillance network, routinely reporting back about the behaviour of overseas Chinese citizens and especially minorities.

Australia is full of CCPs, especially corrupted officials, Canada and Australia are popular destinations because it is first world country with immigration policy. (especially their kids don't study well and are spoiled, it is not a problem for Australia apparently)

Actually most students go to US are amongst the best students from China, either top students or really hardworking students, and most of them will be excellent engineers and scientists, if US is pushing them away, it is probably good for China.

Foreign students pay 2-3x as much as Australians do to study in Australia. Allowing rich Chinese children to study abroad contributes a lot to Australia's economy and those high fees subsidise everyone else which allows keeping local tuition low, which is why Australia is so open to them.

This is the same argument pushed by US and UK universities with huge numbers of foreign students, but how is that reflected in the tuition rates for local students? All that does is pay for an even more over bloated yet ever expanding university system.

> those high fees subsidise everyone else

Rather, they also elevate tuition costs for everyone and many schools are very lenient on cheating by people paying these high fees.

not only students, Australia welcomes every dollar. I don't blame them. It is a beautiful country, and I would go there and live in a mansion if I have enough money. The side effect is the property price will increase, but property owners can make a lot money.

> either top students or really hardworking students, and most of them will be excellent engineers and scientists

Only true for PhD students. Most are just from rich/CCP's families.

Do you think Xi Jinpings daughter studied in the US due to merit or corruption?

I don't think his daughter would have bad scores, in general, those kids would actually do well in school, not spoiled. but I also don't think many (not only Xi's daughter) political offsprings are qualified for the best universities if they were evaluated the same way as commons.

Neither, it's due to real politik.

It's better to have world 'leaders' talking than not, so you bite the bullet and send them to Harvard.

How would anyone here know that? She's not even unde her real name but under a pseudonim.

Hardly anonymous if it's widely known.

What is widely known? What's her name? Where does she study?

Xi Mingze. Harvard. You don't know just because you don't really care about it. The info is on Wikipedia.

The CCP really did a number on perception here with their thousand talents program and the naked espionage efforts.

It is not right if this is racial profiling but the blame for it is on the CCP. The article itself mentions that the numbers affected are a fraction of total Chinese students so I’m inclined to believe it is not racial in nature. It is more a response to Chinese pillaging of Western intellectual property, explicitly in the service of overtaking/dethroning the West.

Another example of what we as open society citizens must deal with, how do we tackle such issues without sacrificing our values.

> how do we tackle such issues without sacrificing our values.

Recognize that "intellectual property" and restriction of knowledge is incompatible with our values. Any publicly funded research should be part of the public domain and published to the world online. Publicly funded universities should be required to post lectures and assignments to the world online. Shorten patents and copyright. Eliminate math/software patents. Eliminate trade secret protections. If a company wants protection, it can get a patent and publish the information.

The ideal citizen in a liberal democratic society is an infinitely knowledgeable one. They can make better voting decisions and are more able to start their own businesses as they understand how the world and their specific industry works.

I'll voice the obvious objection to this: what happens if you share everything you do, then someone else stands on your shoulders and invents a world-changing technology, then refuses to share it back and completely ignores your patent claims? Now they dominate you economically and perhaps militarily.

If your own engineers and scientists already have access to almost all knowledge in their field, it seems unlikely that an invention would be so novel that they couldn't reverse engineer it.

You could have military engineering kept to a more select group, but independent reinvention by researchers or commercial entities should void any secrecy. Otherwise you get silliness like imported Chinese commodity thermal cameras being better than American ones because of ITAR. Or shutting down hobbyist radar projects; if a hobbyist can do it for fun, adversarial military engineers probably can too.

The other defense of course is to base our economy on making things. Pour more resources into manufacturing, industrial automation, and standardization so that when a new technology comes along, we can scale it up. An economy based on knowledge restriction is precarious exactly because others can simply ignore our restrictions. We're hamstringing ourselves and it's an illiberal policy.

> X Edward Guo, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, said that part of the problem is that, unlike in the US, military research does sometimes take place on university campuses. “

Yes those dastardly Chinese universities which do military research on campus, unlike in the good old US.

Of course this is ridiculous, military research is happening on campuses all the time. The Internet I'm sending this through was a DARPA project, never mind the thousands of even more military specific research projects at universities. In fact there are a host of laws requiring the US military on US campuses ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/high-court-rules-in-favor-... )

As long as it’s aimed at people with Chinese citizenship and not anyone that looks remotely Chinese (e.g. Singaporeans, Koreans, etc), I’m not too concerned. They do have laws that force us to look more closely without devolving into pure racism.

As open is America with academics and western countries, other countries are just not that open. Until the feeling of grab only and don't give back it's horrible. Take example of Linux just half of developing countries hardly contribute. Best example is aosp. People want to have roms but don't want to pay

> Take example of Linux just half of developing countries hardly contribute.

It's because Microsoft, a company with headquarters in a developed country, keeps bribing their officials for them to to ignore free software: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreig...

I've been to universities in India where the CS faculty put their "free" Microsoft software boxes on display because the state government has made a deal with MS, but are running Linux on all the computers.

Even without bribes, Windows an Office are already so entrenched into any company and public institution and in the muscle memory of workers for decades at this point, that moving to something else means huge hurdles in terms of infra support and staff retraining, that it becomes the default acquisition choice by IT departments, even without bribes.

I dont even know where to start with this article.

They added in the wif of racism with the covid tie in just to make it sensational.

We do have a score board for this you know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in_t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010–2012_killing_of_CIA_sourc...

Also note, that Americans were getting their shit taken and copied at the border forever. The border being a no rights zone has been an issue that nerds have been vocal about since the days of slashdot... Dont act shocked cause your Chinese and its happening, we do it to our own people too.

There was a time when I was always getting stopped and interrogated at customs coming into Seattle from Beijing. No one else on the Hainan flight I arrived on mind you, just me…I was the only white guy in the crowd of passengers who looked mostly Chinese also. Pretty sure they were profiling me, maybe they were just more suspicious of Americans?

Drugs...

Or you had something unusual going on. They were very concerned when I was trying to fly from Amsterdam to the US on a one way ticket because I had a passport stamp from Iraq which, at the time, was impossible to get unless you were involved with government operations.

And this one time I was stopped by Border Patrol at the Phoenix Greyhound station with zero reasonable articulable suspicion as a 30-something white male who, incidentally, lived in Phoenix.

I was just a techie on a business trip. They were suspicious that my luggage was almost completely empty, because I would fill it up shopping in the states. They would always ask me why I was visiting China and I told them I lived there.

Smuggling drugs out of China sounded dumb back then, given how much more Chinese are strict on the issue than the Americans. But with fentanyl today it makes more sense.

Travelling long haul without relatively 'normal' luggage is always going to attract attention

A border / customs officer in any part of the world is not interested in doing any more work than they absolutely have to. Tell them what they need to hear in order to let you be on your way and everyone will be happier for it.

> part of the problem is that, unlike in the US, military research does sometimes take place on university campuses.

Oddly misleading, military research definitely takes place at US universities.

Yes, massive amounts of university research is funded directly by DoD and various three letter organizations, plus lots and lots of indirect funding through the MIC as well.

I'm honestly a bit appalled by the comments here. Do people nlt see that it's wrong to discriminate an entire ethnicity because of certain bad actors? Is it alright to discriminate against black or marginalized people because a few are violent??

A lot of people also didn't read the article I think, this stretches beyond students to professors who have been working here for decades. Even my mother, who works in astrophysics can no longer collaborate with Chinese universities on astrophysics unless she wants suspicion.

I hope this fervor can end soon and we can once again separate science from politics. Even in the cold war science was not racialized in this way.

Another minor note, these students very much fund most of our universities and serve as brain-drain that is beneficial to us. Once again I'm pretty appalled by this comment section...

Blame it on the CCP, their weaponized industrial espionage network, their Wolf Warrior diplomacy, and countless other needless aggression against other nations. This along with the numerous cases of Chinese Nationals caught stealing IP from foreign companies, it is only logical for the US to be wary of China protect its interests at all costs.

Don't confuse nationality with race/ethnicity.

It's 100% acceptable to be suspicious of foreign nationals hailing from a country that is currently at social/political/military odds with one's own country.

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