A senior Biden administration official has argued for increasing the number of Chinese students studying humanities over sciences in the United States. This follows growing restrictions on Chinese students’ access to sensitive technology at American universities amid national security concerns.
During a Q&A session at a prominent US think tank on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that not enough Americans were studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He said the US needed to recruit more international students for those fields, but from India not China.
Chinese students in the past have made up the largest foreign student body in the US and totaled nearly 290,000 in the last academic year. However, deteriorating US-China ties and concerns about theft of US expertise, have derailed scientific cooperation and subjected Chinese students to unwarranted suspicion.
‘Social sciences, not particle physics’
“I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics," Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank. Campbell was asked about the China Initiative introduced by the Trump administration, intended to combat Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, which ended under the Biden administration after critics said it spurred racial profiling of Asian Americans.
Campbell said US universities had made “careful attempts" to support continuing higher education for Chinese students, but had also been “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.
‘Indian students’
Campbell said some had suggested that China was the only source to make up for 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," he said. 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.
(With agency inputs)
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