US has cancelled more than 1,000 visas for Chinese nationals deemed security risks
10 September, 2020
The United States has revoked visas for more than 1,000 Chinese nationals under a May 29 presidential proclamation to suspend entry from China of students and researchers deemed security risks, circumstances Department spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
The acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, said earlier that Washington was blocking visas “for certain Chinese graduate students and researchers with ties to China’s military fusion technique to prevent them from stealing and otherwise appropriating sensitive research.”
In a speech, Wolf repeated U.S. charges of unjust business practices and commercial espionage by China, including attempts to steal coronavirus research, and accused it of abusing student visas to exploit American academia.
Wolf said america was also “preventing goods created from slave labor from entering our markets, demanding that China respect the inherent dignity of every individual,” an apparent mention of alleged abuses of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
A State Department spokeswoman said the visa action had been taken under a proclamation President Donald Trump announced on, may 29 as part of the U.S. response to China’s curbs on democracy in Hong Kong.
“As of September 8, 2020, the Department has revoked a lot more than 1,000 visas of PRC nationals who were found to be at the mercy of Presidential Proclamation 10043 and therefore ineligible for a visa,” she said.
She said the ineligible “high-risk graduate students and research scholars” represented “a little subset” of the Chinese arriving at the United States to study and research and that legitimate students and scholars would continue being welcomed.
China said in June it resolutely opposed any U.S. move to restrict Chinese students from studying in the usa and urged Washington to do more to improve mutual exchanges and understanding.
Some 360,000 Chinese nationals study in the usa, bringing in significant revenue to U.S. colleges, although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted the return to campus this autumn semester.
DETERIORATING RELATIONS
China-U.S. relations have sunk to historic lows with the world’s two biggest economies clashing over issues which range from trade and human rights to Hong Kong and the coronavirus.
Trump, who had touted friendly ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping as he sought to create good on promises to rebalance a massive trade deficit, has made getting tough on China a key part of his campaign for re-election on Nov. 3. He has accused his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who leads in national judgment polls, to be soft toward Beijing.
Earlier, some Chinese students signed up for U.S. universities said they received emailed notices on Wednesday from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing or U.S. consulates in China informing them their visas had been canceled.
Over 60 students holding F-1 visas including postgraduates and undergraduates said in a WeChat chatroom that the notices mentioned they would need to apply for new visas if they wanted to travel to the United States.
Many in the chatroom said these were majoring in subjects such as for example science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some said these were postgraduates who obtained bachelor’s degrees at Chinese universities with links to the People’s Liberation Army.
Your final year undergraduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was shocked to have obtained the notice.
The only reason he could think about would be his previous experience at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), a Chinese university known because of its defence and security technology research.
“I studied at BUPT before year two, but I have no connections with that university since,” he told Reuters, declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the problem.
IN-MAY, sources with understanding of the problem told Reuters that Washington was likely to cancel the visas of a large number of Chinese graduate students thought to have links to China’s military.
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