Everett F. Drumright, the American consul-general in Hong Kong, believed that the United States was confronting a grave threat to its national security. It was 1955, and the consular officers were being besieged by Chinese people seeking to flee the mainland and immigrate to the U.S., claiming that they were American citizens through a parent. According to Drumright, virtually all of them were relying on fictitious documents. He issued an eighty-nine-page report, laden with racist insinuations and filled with alarm about the infiltration of the country by “Chinese Communist agents,” in which he warned that China was poised to exploit America’s immigration system “to the service of her purposes alone.”
Soon after Drumright submitted his report, federal prosecutors embarked on a wide-ranging probe of the Chinese community. In New York, prosecutors announced that they had uncovered a vast criminal scheme that had smuggled into the U.S. thousands of immigrants, including Communist agents with “concealed skills,” planted, as one newspaper put it, by the “Red Chinese government.” Prosecutors ultimately brought cases against nearly sixty defendants—laundrymen, dishwashers, and others—on assorted immigration-fraud charges. Yet the findings revealed nothing like the elaborate espionage operation that Drumright had laid out.
Late last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump Administration would begin “aggressively revoking” the visas of Chinese students, including those studying in “critical fields” and those “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” (The Party has some ninety-nine million members and is intertwined with nearly all aspects of Chinese life.) The announcement is the latest effort in the Administration’s apparent attempt to force a rupture between China and the U.S. In April, it imposed punitive new tariffs on China, only to pause them, as the two nations agreed to continue trade negotiations. (Last Thursday, President Trump said that he and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had “a very good phone call” and would hold a new round of talks.) At the end of May, Trump officials blocked exports to China of certain technologies, including those related to jet engines and semiconductors. In another move that seems calculated to send a message to Beijing, the Justice Department announced charges last week against two researchers—“citizens of the People’s Republic of China”—for allegedly smuggling into the country last summer a fungus that causes “head blight” in grains and, prosecutors said, is a “potential agroterrorism weapon.”
The Drumright report is a reminder of how long suspicion has trailed people of Chinese descent in the U.S. Donald Trump, during his first term, reportedly said, referring to China, that “almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.” A recent survey by the Asian American Foundation found that forty per cent of Americans believe that Asian Americans are more loyal to their countries of origin than to the U.S.
Chinese citizens studying in the U.S. have long provided a connection between the two countries. In 1854, Yung Wing became the first Chinese graduate of an American university, earning a diploma from Yale. In 1872, with the support of the Qing government, he established the Chinese Educational Mission, which brought a hundred and twenty Chinese pupils to New England. In 1881, as anger over immigration rose, Chinese officials shuttered the mission. The following year, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring laborers from entering the country. A coterie of missionaries, diplomats, and business leaders pressed to ease entry for students. By the early twentieth century, hundreds of Chinese students were on American campuses. When Mao Zedong’s Communist Party seized power, in 1949, nearly four thousand found themselves stranded in the U.S. and suddenly objects of suspicion. Federal agents subjected them to interrogations and even incarceration. It took several years before the hysteria faded. In 1965, a sweeping new law finally placed Chinese—and other Asian—immigrants on equal footing with everyone else trying to enter the U.S. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping, set on modernizing his nation, restored diplomatic relations between the countries, and Chinese students began arriving in earnest. Their numbers surged again in the mid-aughts, as China’s increasingly robust economy became integrated with the global economic order.
Today, there are two hundred and seventy-seven thousand Chinese students in America. Many of them were children during the aughts, when China’s market was opening up. Liwei Zhang—not his real name—was born in Beijing, the son of a police officer and a nurse. When Zhang was four, his parents bought him a boxed set of Disney DVDs, and he watched them all. His favorite was “Winnie the Pooh.” When he got older, he binged television shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Breaking Bad.”
Zhang’s English improved rapidly, and all that TV-watching influenced his world view. He came to understand that people in other countries lived differently from those in China, ruled by an authoritarian regime. He enrolled in a prestigious university near his home, but bridled at the required propagandistic classes. For his junior year, he won a scholarship to attend a university in California, where he thrived. He returned to Beijing resolving to apply to graduate school in the U.S., only for the pandemic to intervene. Eventually, he enrolled in a journalism program on the West Coast. After getting his degree, he landed a job at the school, taking advantage of a special extension of his student visa for additional training in his field.
Earlier this year, Zhang started seeing reports on Chinese social media of students whose visas were cancelled and whose legal status had been terminated. Word spread that many of them had previously had encounters with the legal system, even for a minor infraction. (In late April, federal officials revealed that they had run students’ names through a computerized index that includes criminal-history information.) A few years ago, Zhang got a speeding ticket. Now he worried that this made him vulnerable. He said that he and his peers feel a “constant sense of panic.”
The United States’ diplomatic approach to China has long oscillated between conflicting credos—either that it represents an existential threat on the geopolitical stage or that it should be engaged as a potential partner. President Trump’s dial is perpetually set on bellicose. Last Wednesday, he issued a proclamation targeting international students at Harvard, in which he repeatedly invoked the Chinese menace and accused China and other “foreign adversaries” of “exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes.” The alarm rings familiar, and so does the cost of overreach. ♦