Senior US Official: The US Needs Chinese Students in Humanities, Indian Students in Sciences

According to Reuters, on June 24 local time, United States Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell asserted that the U.S. needed Chinese students to study humanities and Indian students to study STEM subjects.

Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, Campbell said, “I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics.”

The U.S. should welcome more students from China, Campbell said, but they should come to study the humanities rather than the sciences. He noted that U.S. universities were limiting Chinese students’ access to sensitive technologies due to security concerns.

There are not enough Americans studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics, he said, and the U.S. needs to recruit more international students in those fields, but from India, an increasingly important security partner to the U.S. — rather than from China.

Campbell was also asked about the so-called “China Initiative,” reportedly a plan put forward under former President Donald Trump’s administration, "intended to combat alleged Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft,” which was terminated during the Biden administration.

U.S. universities had made “careful attempts” to support students from China in continuing their higher education, but they were also “careful about the labs [and] some of the activities of Chinese students,” Campbell said. “I do think it is possible to curtail and to limit certain kinds of access, and we have seen that generally, particularly in technological programs across the United States.”

Some people saw China as the U.S.’ only source to make up for its shortage of science and engineering students, he said, but “I believe that the largest increase that we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students that come to study in American universities on a range of technology and other fields.”

As Reuters pointed out, Chinese students have been the largest group of foreign students in the U.S., numbering nearly 290,000 in the 2022-2023 academic year.

For some time now, the U.S. government has been regularly subjecting Chinese overseas students to repressive restrictions, as well as to gratuitous harassment, interrogations and repatriations.

According to incomplete statistics reported on by China Daily, in recent years, the U.S. has groundlessly provoked, interrogated and repatriated more than 30 Chinese students with computer-related majors. The vast majority of these have been graduate students, with more than half of them holding doctorates and coming from well-known U.S. colleges and universities in research fields such as artificial intelligence, information science, network security, electrical engineering, software engineering and electronic information engineering.

On March 8 of this year, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded to the matter of Chinese students being interrogated and repatriated on entering the U.S. She qualified the American approach as going far beyond the normal scope of law enforcement, saying that it was marked by strong ideological bias and seriously infringed on the legitimate legal rights and interests of the parties involved. She went on to say that it represented a major interference in normal people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S., and that it was a significant violation of the consensus between the Chinese and U.S. heads of state to strengthen and facilitate people-to-people exchanges between the two countries. China was deeply dissatisfied with and resolutely opposed to such an approach, she said, and had issued a strongly worded protest to the U.S.

Mao noted that the U.S. has long advertised its supposed openness and freedom, repeatedly claiming that it values cultural exchanges between the U.S. and China and welcomes Chinese students, but in fact it has continued to overstretch the concept of national security and has taken selective, discriminatory and political enforcement measures against Chinese students — the trouble lying, in essence, with the Cold War mentality of some in the U.S.

Mao reiterated that China urged the U.S. to cease its harassment — under the pretense of national security — of Chinese students going to the U.S., to stop poisoning public opinion on China-U.S. relations and to stop obstructing friendly exchanges between the people of the two countries: China would take resolute measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens.