Beijing is hampering people-level exchange efforts by harassing Chinese citizens in US-led programmes, senior US State Department officials said on Thursday.
“The [Ministry of State Security] has called out academic exchanges as an example of foreign espionage activities, which led PRC academics to cancel their participation in US exchange programmes,” one said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The official added that China’s foreign NGO law had “systematically” reduced the number of people willing to work with US partners on people-to-people exchanges. The law, in effect since 2017, subjects foreign NGOs to close government scrutiny with stringent registration and reporting requirements.
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These comments come as both the US and China have stressed the importance of people-t0-people exchange and the need to resume dialogue after years of Covid-19-related border closures.
After their meeting during the Apec conference in November, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden acknowledged the need to expand bilateral educational, student, youth, cultural, sports and business exchanges.
Xi said that China specifically hoped to welcome 50,000 young Americans over the next five years in exchange and study programmes. Earlier this year, Beijing announced the Young Envoys Scholarship to facilitate that goal.
But despite the lifting of Covid-related measures, travel between the two countries continues to be marred by border issues on both sides.
In recent months, China’s foreign ministry has spoken out about Chinese students facing increased harassment and deportation as they arrive in at US airports, noting at a January briefing in Beijing that there were at least eight such cases.
In response, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that the percentage of Chinese students who have been detained “is less than one-tenth of one per cent” and that “the percentage has been stable over the past few years”.
The behaviour of Chinese security personnel drives the State Department’s travel advisory for mainland China, US officials said. Set to “level three” on a four-level risk scale, the designation refers to “reconsider travel” and cites the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, “including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions”.
Senior State Department officials said on Thursday that such practices by China are continuing and that they know of “many US citizens who continue to suffer, who are unable to leave the PRC”, without providing specifics on the number of people affected.
China slams US for ‘persecuting’ Chinese students over national security
“PRC security personnel can detain and deport US citizens for things like sending private electronic messages critical of their government,” one said.
The security personnel appear to have “broad discretion to deem a wide variety of documents, data, statistics to be considered to be state secrets and prosecute people for espionage”, the official added.
But the officials stressed that reducing the imbalance in people-level exchange remained a key objective of the State Department.
In 2023, just a few hundred Americans were estimated to be studying in China, with China only reopening its borders in March that year – down from over 11,000 in 2019.
In contrast, almost 290,000 Chinese students were in the US in 2023.
The post-Covid return to China for Americans has begun, with flights gradually increasing, US study programmes resumed or being launched and business executives trickling back in.
But the State Department travel designation, on top of China’s increased scrutiny on “due diligence” professionals, has led schools and would-be travellers to hesitate.
State politics in the US have also led to the severing of ties between US and mainland Chinese schools, decreasing opportunities for Americans to go to China.
Earlier this year, Florida International University confirmed it was severing several partnerships with Chinese universities, including a two-decades-old hospitality programme with the Tianjin University of Commerce.
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