President Trump has announced that he may allow as many as 600,000 Chinese students to enter the United States. While I generally support most of the president’s decisions, this move poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.
There have been numerous cases of Chinese graduate students stealing American intellectual property and even biological samples. But the most compelling reason to restrict their entry is that Chinese law obligates all citizens to spy for the regime. And the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) routinely threatens or coerces individuals and their families until they comply. By this standard, Chinese students in the U.S. are effectively acting as spies, or what U.S. law officially refers to as “foreign agents.”
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), individuals must register if they act “at the order, request, direction, or control of” a foreign principal, even without a contract or formal agreement. The law also considers whether requests are made through coercion or threats, and whether the foreign principal exercises power over the agent. By these standards, Chinese students studying in America meet the definition of foreign agents and should be required to register.
The PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, Article 7, states: “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.” In practice, this means that when intelligence agencies demand information or assistance, compliance is mandatory, and refusal can result in punishment.
The scope of the law is global, applying to all Chinese citizens, organizations, and institutions regardless of location. Failure to aid public or state security agencies constitutes a violation of Chinese law. Its sweeping reach makes it especially dangerous, as “national intelligence” is defined as anything that could endanger the “national security and interests” of the People’s Republic of China, a vague standard the CCP can exploit to classify virtually any academic or scientific research as subject to collection.
The most common coercion tactic is threatening family members who remain in China. U.S. intelligence officials have noted that “the ability to blackmail people into being agents because of threats to their family is very powerful.” In one case, authorities retaliated against Chinese dissident Sulaiman Gu by harassing his relatives and freezing control over a property worth more than $300,000. Similarly, a 2018 New Jersey court case revealed how a former Chinese official living in the U.S. was pressured by the Wuhan-based Xinba Construction Group. He received threats, was harassed outside court, and was later sent a coerced video of his family pleading for his return.
China’s intelligence gathering through students abroad is systematic and organized. Investigations at Stanford revealed that many Chinese nationals are assigned handlers whose job is to collect and relay information. One source explained, “Many Chinese [nationals] have handlers; they [the CCP] want to know everything that’s going on at Stanford. This is a very normal thing. They just relay the information they have.”
Much of this activity is tied to state sponsorship. Many graduate students in the U.S. receive funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC), a government program that pays tuition and expenses for carefully selected candidates. Recipients must pass party loyalty tests and are reportedly required to visit Chinese consulates to provide updates on their research. The majority of Chinese students in the U.S. are concentrated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, fields the CCP prioritizes for espionage. Nearly half pursue advanced degrees, ensuring direct involvement in research.
Through financial sponsorship, ideological vetting, and structured reporting, the CCP has created a pipeline of talent it can exploit for intelligence gathering in sensitive fields across American universities. According to accounts from students themselves, “Every single week I’m asked to meet a handler where I’ll be asked to talk about the research I’m doing, the directions that research is going in, how that research is progressing, and how we could reimplement that research back in China.”
One notable case was that of Ji Chaoqun, who came to Chicago in 2013 to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves.
In 2018 he was arrested for secretly acting as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security. Convicted of espionage and making false statements to the Army, he was sentenced in 2022 to eight years in prison for attempting to gather information on American engineers and scientists.
In 2024, five students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, enrolled in an exchange program at the University of Michigan, were caught photographing military equipment at Camp Grayling during training exercises involving Taiwanese forces. Their arrests on espionage-related charges prompted Michigan to sever ties with the Chinese university in early 2025.
Another example is that of Hao Zhang and Wei Pang, doctoral students in electrical engineering in Southern California, who were charged with stealing thin-film bulk acoustic resonator technology from U.S. firms Avago and Skyworks. Between 2010 and 2015, Zhang funneled research to China and was later convicted of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and conspiracy.
In September 2020, the U.S. State Department cancelled the visas of 1,000 Chinese students and researchers, citing ties to the People’s Liberation Army and accusations of espionage. A survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 49 percent of Chinese espionage cases involved individuals directly connected to the military or government.
Nothing has changed in China since then, so it must be assumed that the same proportion of students still have links to intelligence services or can be coerced by the CCP to spy on the United States. Consequently, cancelling all Chinese student visas would be the safer option.
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