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Tom Cotton Is Right About Restricting Chinese Student Visas
Federalist via Instapundit
If a foreign nation harbors hegemonic ambitions, tells us technological superiority is key to achieving them, and pilfers our intellectual property to accomplish it, aren’t our leaders duty-bound to do something about it?

Communist China is just such a nation, posing just such a problem for America. Yet the notion that we ought, for example, to harden our schools against Chinese penetration in strategically significant areas seems to vex some of our betters.

...A recent Pew poll showed that nine-in-10 Americans view China’s power and influence as a threat, with 62 percent believing it constitutes a major threat. Yet Cotton came under fire, with the likes of Obama administration national security official Ben Rhodes perversely claiming it is in part because of China hawks like Cotton that China has advanced its technological capability relative to America.
Does a hypothesis that USA "elites" are in love with Chinese money - and use their transnationalism as an excuse - merits serious consideration?
...Protecting America against a bellicose, rapacious, and regressive CCP is neither self-defeating nor xenophobic, but eminently sensible. As the Senate homeland security subcommittee noted in a November 2019 report on China’s Thousand Talents Program, China seeks to be the world leader in science and technology by 2050. It is engaged in a whole-of-society effort to achieve it, with an emphasis on military-civil fusion.

This includes the Thousand Talents Program, one of more than 200 such recruitment programs the Communist Chinese regime uses to incentivize people to export valuable research and development fruits to China. Under that program, China has recruited more than 7,000 "high-end professionals"—among them several Nobel laureates—including Chinese nationals.

Chinese students are coming in ever-greater numbers to study in America. In the 2018-2019 school year, a staggering 369,548 such students attended U.S. colleges and universities. Consistent with Rhodes’ view, the Obama administration allowed these numbers to mushroom from 127,628 during 2009-2010, to 350,755 in 2016-2017.

    while the vast majority of students and researchers from China are in the United States for legitimate academic reasons...the Chinese government uses some Chinese students—mostly post-graduate students and post-doctorate researchers studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—and professors to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property.

While most Chinese nationals may be genuinely here to receive an education, the risk remains. As a senior U.S. official told Reuters in 2018, "Every Chinese student...has to go through a party and government approval process...You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state."

The litany of Department of Justice (DOJ) indictments related to Chinese efforts to exploit the American academy are a testament to this. When the FBI announced arguably the most prominent of all to date in January 2020, concerning eminent Harvard University professor Dr. Charles Lieber, an alleged contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Program, the DOJ also announced charges for two Chinese nationals.

...The CCP uses our freedoms and ambitions against us, whether in taking advantage of our openness and benevolence to infiltrate American universities, or capitalizing on our greed to influence our business world, and Hollywood. Why continue any policy that serves the CCP’s desired ends?
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Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-05-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=570771