What the West still gets wrong about Chinese students

The Red Scare drove stupid mistakes in the last century – let's not repeat them

The question of Chinese students is again in the news, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announces ambitions to ‘aggressively revoke’ their visas. The pendulum of western public opinion has tended to swing from seeing these young people as either temporary customers or potential spies. In my latest column for The Times, I suggest a third way: if you really want to win the tech/science/AI/arms race against China, instead of pushing young Chinese away from the West, you need to retain them and deny their brainpower to Beijing. I start with the ever-relevant and tragic cautionary tale of Qian Xuesen:

By the time he was accused of being a spy, the Shanghai-born aerospace engineer Qian Xuesen had been a leading scientist developing American missile technology and had helped to lay the ground for the establishment of Nasa.

His American dream, begun in 1935 as a student at MIT, ended in 1955 when he was deported to China. As with many victims of McCarthyism, no evidence ever emerged to suggest that Qian was a communist. “It was the stupidest thing this country ever did,” Dan Kimball, the under-secretary of the navy, later said.

Injustice aside, the stupidity was underlined when Qian went on to lead the development of Maoist China’s military engineering, including its nuclear and intercontinental missiles and its first artificial satellite (Mao dubbed the programme “Two Bombs, One Satellite”). America had expelled one of its brightest and offered him up to the other side.

There are many more Qian Xuesen’s out there. For example, the brilliant Global AI Talent Tracker from the research unit Macro Polo finds that 47 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers come from China.

Half of them leave their country to go study abroad – in the US, the UK, Europe, Canada, etc. Another study finds that 91 per cent of those taking up a PhD in the US stay after five years. I’m not surprised that so many want to stay – they’re just young people looking for the best possible career and life outcomes. It’s a shame that so many in the West seem to think that these young people are only or mainly driven by loyalty to the CCP, rather than being their own people who have their own inner lives, including dreams and ambitions for the future.

I don’t want to dismiss the risks that a small minority of these students pose. In my column I break them down into three categories and give some practical suggestions for how to mitigate them…

Fear makes people do stupid things. With the return of the Red Scare, I hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the last century and be able to take a more calculated look at the risks and rewards this time around. The stakes are much higher.