As tensions with China rise, scientists at America’s leading universities complain of stalled research after crackdown at airports

Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered. ⠀

Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023. The embassy said it had complained to the US authorities about each case. ⠀

“The impact is huge,” says Qin Yan, a professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, who says that he is aware of more than a dozen Chinese students from Yale and other universities who have been rejected by the US in recent months, despite holding valid visas. Experiments have stalled, and there is a “chilling effect” for the next generation of Chinese scientists. ⠀

The refusals appear to be linked to a 2020 US rule that barred Chinese postgraduate students with links to China’s “military-civil fusion strategy”, which aims to leverage civilian infrastructure to support military development. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinktank estimates that 95 civilian universities in China have links to the defence sector.

Nearly 2,000 visas applications were rejected on that basis in 2021. But now people who pass the security checks necessary to be granted a visa by the State Department are being turned away at the border by CBP, a different branch of government.

“It is very hard for a CBP officer to really evaluate the risk of espionage,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts, who represents a graduate student at Yale who, midway through her PhD, was sent back from Washington’s Dulles airport in December, and banned from re-entering the US for five years. ⠀

Academics say that scrutiny has widened to different fields – particularly medical sciences – with the reasons for the refusals not made clear.

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  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    Just comical amounts of racism. I guess it’s only fitting that the US chase the braindrain it relies on to drive any productive sectors it hasn’t outsourced back to their home countries as it spirals into imperial decline.

  • Liz@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    Yeah I mean, pay your graduate students about twice as much and make them only work 40 hours a week. Then you won’t have to import labor from outside the county.

  • YEP [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    X Edward Guo, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, said that part of the problem is that, unlike in the US, military research does sometimes take place on university campuses. “It’s not black and white … there are medical universities that also do military. But 99% of those professors are doing biomedical research and have nothing to do with the military.”.

    Us University’s don’t do military research

    Yes they do ???

      • Arelin@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        Lmao liberals getting mad at (in this case non-existent) “violations” of laws that only exist to protect the capitalist class is always funny

        Intellectual property shouldn’t exist in the first place; it kills millions of people every year from patented drugs, etc. and it did so in Africa during covid.

        • Rinox@feddit.it
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          7 months ago

          While I agree that intellectual property has been abused over and over, especially in the last two decades, we need to remember the reason why patents became a thing, and that reason was to promote open research and cooperation.

          Without patents the only tool businesses had to protect and exploit their inventions and discoveries was secrecy, which creates a terrible environment for research, full of espionage and subterfuge and without a library of human inventions and research ready for anyone to take and build upon.

          It’s somewhat of a necessary evil, a carrot in order to incentivize businesses and individuals to share their research and their inventions, instead of keeping them to themselves in fear of someone else stealing them. It does have issues though, especially regarding the lack of a “fair” use of the monopoly the patent grants for it’s duration.

          And, again, I’m talking about patents. Copyright is a whole other can of worms, way worse in some ways.

        • AbackDeckWARLORD
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          7 months ago

          Neo-liberals are capitalists. They just virtue signal about leftist points sometimes.

        • MxM111@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          Those drugs wouldn’t be developed in the first place, if there were no IP. The system is not ideal, but I would rather address its issues than destroy everything completely. When hous is on fire, the right thing is put out the fire, not to destroy the town.

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
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            7 months ago

            Cuba literally developed vaccines without IP nonsense, your argument kinda rings hollow

            • MxM111@kbin.social
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              7 months ago

              It is not impossible, but are you seriously want to compare pharmaceutical advancements of Cuba and US? You can even compare USSR and USA at the time. USSR medicine was significantly behind.

              • Match!!@pawb.social
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                7 months ago

                Cuba has 3% of the population of the US. I think it is fair to say they have disproportionately more medical advancement than expected for their population and wealth level.

                • MxM111@kbin.social
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                  7 months ago

                  I am not sure “advancement per person” is right metric - the more advances the much harder to make those. This is why I was suggesting to compare it to USSR - fair comparison.

                • MxM111@kbin.social
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                  7 months ago

                  Source? I would like to see how cuban pharmaceuticals are more advanced than that in US. Until you show concrete proof, I will say this is made up statement.

          • The Uncanny Observer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            7 months ago

            Your comment is pretty ridiculous when you consider that multiple times in history, the scientists who invented vaccines or treatments that saved millions of people put those inventions into the public domain.

            The idea that without capitalism, there is no innovation, is ridiculous. Capitalism is a fairly new idea in history, you’ve just fallen for the propaganda.

          • Arelin@lemmy.zip
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            7 months ago

            When hous is on fire, the right thing is put out the fire

            The fire is the capitalist laws like IP; the “hous” is a country’s development. So yes, the fire should be put out.

          • hglman@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            People hate saving others, you really have to give them so many incentives to care. /S

      • Arcturus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        Yeah, it’s terrible how capitalists and their megacorps might not profit as much if that’s happening…

        (which it isn’t these days btw; countries like the US and China violated bullshit british IP laws when industrializing, and they don’t really need to do that once they are industrialized)

        • ed_cock@feddit.de
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          7 months ago

          You are making it sound like China and its large corporations weren’t also very interested in profits and market domination.

          • Arcturus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            7 months ago

            That’s included in the “industrializing” part, no?

            Under capitalism, industrialization and therefore “market domination” realistically means ignoring the laws meant to keep competition down.

    • nekandro@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Stealing IP by… Publishing their own work on publicly accessible journals and conferences? The absolute horror. You don’t steal public IP, you gain (or lose) the rights to use it.

      • UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        I would have no problem if everything was open sourced. However, Chinese capitalists steal this data, make it proprietary and profit off of it themselves. This is the “horror”.

        • nekandro@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          It’s public research. How exactly do you propose to make public research proprietary? The university holds the rights.

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Same shit different era. Always gotta be persecuting somebody.

    Also when Silicon Valley copies and steals they get praised as revolutionary innovators.

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    I foremost hope that the United States can regain a shred of its diginity and stop treating every foreigner like a criminal, stop funding a genocide, stop killing its own population with guns, have a decent social services program, etc. This is obviously a fantasy, so I secondarily hope these researchers can go back to China and do good work, where they won’t be treated as second-tier human beings.

  • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    The Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinktank estimates that 95 civilian universities in China have links to the defence sector.

    Oh, the think tank with the guy who gets satellite images of schools and says that it’s definitely a Uighur concentration camp, the one funded by the military.

  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Not surprising when you look at all the anti-China stuff coming out of mainstream liberal orgs and communities.

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Biden doing the Trump thing. Recently came up with genius tarifs for Aluminium as well.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered.

    The exact number of incidents is difficult to verify, as the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency does not provide detailed statistics about refusals at airports.

    But the personal accounts speak to a broader concern that people-to-people exchanges between the world’s two biggest economies and scientific leaders are straining.

    But now people who pass the security checks necessary to be granted a visa by the State Department are being turned away at the border by CBP, a different branch of government.

    “It is very hard for a CBP officer to really evaluate the risk of espionage,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts, who represents a graduate student at Yale who, midway through her PhD, was sent back from Washington’s Dulles airport in December, and banned from re-entering the US for five years.

    But following years of scrutiny from the Department of Justice investigation into funding links to China, and a rise in anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic, ethnically Chinese scientists say the atmosphere is becoming increasingly hostile.


    The original article contains 865 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
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    7 months ago

    Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023.

    So like 20 out of about 20k/year. Big story.

    • AcidLeaves [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      that 20k is all immigrant visas not just student ones

      also it’s 70 postgraduate students in specific engineering/science industries. The huge majority of students are doing bachelor’s and a lot of them in shit like econ or math

    • alpaga1@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      I like how the summary conveniently avoid mentioning the fact that in the year 2023 30000 visa were given to chinese students. Its quite sad how most people dont bother reading the article. As per the article: “The number of people affected is a tiny fraction of the total number of Chinese students in the US. The State Department issued nearly 300,000 visas to Chinese students in the year to September 2023. But the personal accounts speak to a broader concern that people-to-people exchanges between the world’s two biggest economies and scientific leaders are straining.”

      • assyrian [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        do you think you sound smart or something? yeah they’re not deporting every single Chinese student, how many need to be deported for you to care about it? it’s a problem, it’s racism, and it describes a general anti-Chinese sentiment within the US. Asian hate crimes have increased, professors have been falsely accused and fired because of “espionage” with no proof, and so on.

        how many Swedes do you think are being falsely deported?

        • alpaga1@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          I never said racism wasn’t an issue, but I found the tread quite misleading towards the situation, especially since the reverse from us to china is also true, the underlying problem here is more complex and not unidimensional.

          If you need more context: As mentioned in the article, and a view a shared, the underlying problem that drives this vicious cycle is underlying espionage risk and general distrust between two frictional powers on a path of collision, against the interest of their own people. I don’t think we can blame this situation solely on the US as China behaviour is not exemplar itself. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world, where governments put their own interest above all else.

          I didn’t expect to have to say this, as i think its not really the topic we are discussing here but still. I dont know about the atmosphere in america and the anti asian sentiment because of covid, but i find something like that quite despicable, and will not bring us anywhere.