The US diplomat stated that the US needed to recruit more international students for these fields, emphasizing the need to prioritize students from India, an increasingly important US security partner, over those from China.
Washington: The United States should welcome more students from China to study humanities rather than sciences, the second-highest-ranking U.S. diplomat stated on Monday. He noted that U.S. universities are limiting Chinese students’ access to sensitive technology due to security concerns.
Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell emphasized that not enough Americans are pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. To address this, he suggested the U.S. should recruit more international students for these disciplines, particularly from India—an increasingly significant U.S. security partner—rather than China.
For years, Chinese students have constituted the largest foreign student group in the U.S., numbering nearly 290,000 in the 2022/23 academic year. However, some in academia and civil society argue that deteriorating U.S.-China relations and concerns about the theft of U.S. expertise have disrupted scientific cooperation and subjected Chinese students to undue suspicion.
“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.
When asked about the China Initiative, introduced by the Trump administration to combat Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, Campbell noted it ended under the Biden administration after critics claimed it spurred racial profiling of Asian Americans.
Campbell stated that U.S. universities had made “careful attempts” to continue supporting higher education for Chinese students while being cautious about their activities in certain labs.
“I do think it is possible to curtail and limit certain kinds of access, and we have seen that generally, particularly in technological programs across the United States,” he said.
Campbell dismissed the notion that China was the only source to fill the shortage of science students. “I believe that the largest increase we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students studying in American universities in various technology and other fields.”
He stressed the importance of maintaining links between China and the U.S., despite Beijing officials being largely responsible for any decline 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 sustained,” Campbell said, adding that foreign executives and philanthropists were wary of long-term stays in China due to personal security concerns.
