Reporters pressed Trump on Monday inside the Oval Office during his meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung about whether he intended to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump replied by saying that President Xi had already invited him to visit China. He described the link between both countries as highly important, noting that the US was collecting large amounts of money from China through tariffs and other economic measures.
He also turned his focus to Chinese students, explaining, “I keep hearing people say we should stop their students, but we are going to keep admitting them. We will continue to welcome them. This matters a lot – there are 600,000 students.”
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Trump Speaks Further on Chinese Students
On Tuesday, during a cabinet meeting, Trump repeated what he said about Chinese students, stressing, “I already told President Xi that we are honored to host their students here.”
He added that the US still screens carefully and checks the backgrounds of those who come. According to him, the country would find it hard to manage without the presence of students from China.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs also shared that Trump told Xi during a June phone call that “the US enjoys having Chinese students studying in America.”
The Administration’s Previous Position on the Issue
Back in late May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that Trump would act firmly by revoking visas of Chinese students.
Rubio posted on X that the US government would begin canceling visas for Chinese students, especially those linked to the Communist Party or enrolled in sensitive academic areas.
At the time, the administration did not outline exactly which students would be targeted. Analysts considered the lack of detail as a deliberate choice to keep the policy uncertain.
Kyle Chan, a China researcher at Princeton University, explained to Al Jazeera in May that the vagueness was part of the strategy, arguing it was less about real national security risks and more about sending a political message.
In August, according to the BBC, quoting an unnamed State Department official, 6,000 visas belonging to international students were revoked due to overstays and violations of US law. Their nationalities were not specified.
While Rubio avoided naming which academic areas were considered “critical fields,” in March, a congressional committee of the House of Representatives wrote to several US universities. The letter demanded details about Chinese nationals registered in advanced programs such as science, engineering, medicine, and technology.
The committee’s chair, John Moolenaar, alleged that the Chinese Communist Party was deliberately placing researchers in American institutions to gain access to sensitive technologies.
Current Numbers of Chinese Students in the US
Data from the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the US State Department showed that during the 2023-2024 academic year, there were 277,398 Chinese students in American universities. This represented 24.5 percent of the 1.13 million total international student population.
The same report highlighted that Chinese students ranked second, with Indian students making up 29 percent of all foreign students in the US that year.
In the 2022-2023 academic session, Chinese nationals accounted for 27.4 percent of international students.
Their proportion was even larger during the 2020-2021 academic year, when they represented 34.7 percent of the international student population in the United States.
