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US should stop toxic policy on academic exchanges

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voice_cd

Jul 08, 2021, 10:15

Once again, the US showed it's two-faced by denying over 500 Chinese students' visa applications to study in the US.

Of the affected students, a quarter had been awarded US scholarships and had received offers to pursue postgraduate studies as STEM majors at top US universities.

Though the Biden administration said in April it would ease restrictions on Chinese and other students traveling to the United States and most affected students submitted visa applications after President Joe Biden took office, the rejections were still based on the Trump-era Immigration and Nationality Act and Presidential Proclamation 10043, which suspends entry for Chinese students and researchers who Washington deems as being connected to China's "military-civil fusion strategy".

How hypocritical that the US pretends to hold an open attitude to international students while actually sticking to the wrong policy of suppressing Chinese students and scholars. Such a policy to sever academic exchanges will only release more political viruses and further poison the already severely damaged Sino-US ties.

Such a move not only harms the legitimate rights of the Chinese students, interrupting the normal education and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries, but also casts a shadow on US higher education.

China remained the largest source of international students in the US. There were over 372,000 Chinese graduate students and Optional Practical Training students in the US from 2019 to 2020, and this number has been increasing for the 16th consecutive year, according to the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit in New York.

No doubt the US administration's discrimination against Chinese students will prompt many Chinese families to remake their decisions after they feel the chill of the US's wrong policy. The policy will eventually deal a blow to the whole US education market for international students.

To play smart and wise, the US should stop using all kinds of excuses to restrict and suppress Chinese students, and create a healthy atmosphere for China-US people-to-people exchanges and educational cooperation.

The US-China relationship is chilly, and "trust deficits" should be mended. The key to increasing mutual confidence is rational dialogue and active communication. Only by establishing people-to-people exchanges for dialogue can the two countries avoid strategic misjudgment.

An effective favorable condition for Sino-US cultural and educational exchanges for coordination can be an antidote to the poison of the US political atmosphere. US politicians shouldn't destroy that.

3 834
Newtown
markwu post time: 2021-07-09 10:59

"These how-to tools are universal to any discipline and thus can be done, anywhere." All good then, the whole practice of international academic exchanges can thus be discontinued.

markwu

Those students banned from studying in the US would be mostly STEM scholarship holders. This means they are the cream of the crop from China.

So if the only reason the US gave was that they had military PLA links, have the US asked themselves first if China had wanted to send military spies, would the US have been able to find out they could be before they made their visa applications?

Secondly, those students are what US academic research labs need in order to progress US research both by brains and capital. Any research findings would first be received by the US authorities even if military applications would have been implied to have refluxed back to China - in which case if two socalled adversaries know about something, wouldn't it nullify any advantage to either to use the application to start an advantageous one-sided conflict, especially when intellectual capital to a discovery would be known to both the US supervisor inasmuch the China student?

Thirdly, if the US persists in not being open enough to support global meritocracy independent of its ideological silo-mindset, that's to the US' loss. 

After all, China's brain powers can be seen in just one small example - rebuffed by the west to participate in its space station program, she developed her own, a feat reflecting her other technical achievement in radio astronomy that rekindles her ancient prowess in studying the stars, comets and seasons, long before the west emerged with Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton.

After so many waves of China students studying in the US as its biggest group of brains recipients, the methods and processes of doing scientific and technology research would already be known to them and can be iterated further to the cutting edges. These how-to tools are universal to any discipline and thus can be done, anywhere.

GhostBuster

US is the single major driving force to push for all things against China with or without reasons both directly or indirectly. 

With loss of sense in its faculty of thoughts, US drains itself beyond limits so as to cover its own threat to the world but and unfortunately the evil slips out to exhibit itself to the world.

China tested the atom bomb, hydrogen bomb and made significant progress in the fields of science and technology. All these were made possible because the world believes and accepts that China can not and will not be able to do so.

THANK YOU!