The second-ranked US diplomat stated on Monday that the US should accept more Chinese students, but they should major in the humanities rather than the sciences. She also mentioned that US colleges are restricting Chinese students’ access to sensitive technology due to security concerns.
Kurt Campbell, the deputy secretary of state, claimed that not enough Americans were pursuing degrees in mathematics, science, technology, and engineering. He asserted that the US should hire more foreign students in those fields, preferably from India, an increasingly significant US security ally, rather than China.
Chinese students, who accounted for nearly 290,000 of all international students enrolled in the US in the 2022–2023 academic year, have long been the majority. However, some in academia and civil society contend that strained ties between the US and China, along with worries about US expertise being pilfered, have scuttled scientific collaboration and unfairly distrusted Chinese students.
Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, “I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics.”
In response to criticism that it encouraged racial profiling of Asian Americans, the Biden administration terminated the China Initiative, which the Trump administration had instituted to counter Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft. Campbell was questioned about this.
In addition to supporting Chinese students’ pursuit of higher education, US colleges, according to Campbell, have exercised “careful attempts” to be “careful about the labs, some of the activities of Chinese students.”
“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,” he said.
Campbell said some had suggested that China was the only source to make up the shortage of science students.
“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.”
Campbell said the US had to be careful to not eliminate links between China and the US, but officials in Beijing were largely to blame for any withering in academic, business or non-profit sector ties.
It really has been China that has made it difficult for the kinds of activities that we would like to see sustaining,” Campbell said, adding that foreign executives and philanthropists were wary about long-term stays in China due to concerns about personal security.
