US visas for Chinese students on rise, official says; concerns remain about unfair treatment

Significant harm

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in April that enforcing deportation orders against Chinese students has caused significant harm to the individuals concerned and disrupted cultural and academic exchanges between China and the US.

"Recent cases demonstrate that US law enforcement officers are engaging in deportation for the sake of deportation, exhibiting political, discriminatory and selective enforcement," she said at a news conference.

Zhu Chenge, an assistant researcher of US diplomacy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the excessive scrutiny of Chinese students by US authorities may seem to affect only a small group, but it is in reality demolishing one of the pillars of the complex interactions between China and the US.

"Normal academic exchanges between two technological powerhouses are disrupted. It is certainly not a positive sign if students and scholars are more concerned about their personal safety than academic matters," Zhu said.

Wang Jialing, a 10th grader in the international class at RCF Experimental School in Beijing, has started to prepare his US university application.

Aiming to enroll into the University of Southern California as a finance major, he inquired about application procedures and career prospects at the education fair. He said he wants to choose a college among the top 50 in the US in a relatively safe state, and plans to return to China after obtaining a bachelor's degree.

Liu Fangyuan, director of the University of Minnesota's China office, said the number of Chinese students at the university has been increasing after the pandemic, and currently accounts for about one-third of the over 5,200 international students on campus.

Around 70 percent of Chinese students apply for undergraduate studies, with most of them seeking to major in business or trending subjects such as computer science and artificial intelligence, she said, adding that no Chinese students at her college has reported visa problems.