The People’s Republic of China has used American schools as their training and research outlets. Now the crackdown is coming.

Academics who have secretly been in bed with China are getting hit with wire fraud charges. And now military “students” will be booted.

The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to American officials with knowledge of the discussions.

The plan would be the first designed to bar the access of a category of Chinese students, who, over all, form the single largest foreign student population in the United States.

This will hit colleges pretty hard. And, frankly, good.

American universities are expected to push back against the administration’s move. While international educational exchange is prized for its intellectual value, many schools also rely on full tuition payments from foreign students to help cover costs, especially the large group of students from China.

They can spend less money on diversity deans that turns this country’s campuses into the PRC while committing treason by aiding the enemy.

Many of them argue that they have effective security protocols in place, and that having Chinese students be exposed to the liberalizing effects of Western institutions outweighs the risks.

That argument has been made for a generation. And it has long since fallen apart. 

The PRC wouldn’t be sending students here if it wasn’t quite confident that they would remain loyal to the homeland. And for the most part they do. They consume American culture, but then go home and join the machine. 

Ask Xi, who spent time in America.

The visa cancellation could affect at least 3,000 students, according to some official estimates. That is a tiny percentage of the approximately 360,000 Chinese students in the United States. But some of those affected might be working on important research projects.

For the enemy.

American officials who defend the visa cancellation said the ties to the Chinese military at those schools go far deeper than mere campus recruiting. Instead, in many cases, the Chinese government plays a role in selecting which students from the schools with ties to the military can study abroad, one official said. In some cases, students who are allowed to go overseas are expected to collect information as a condition of having their tuition paid, the official said, declining to reveal specific intelligence on the matter.

Of course they do. This is widely known. Have we learned nothing from the Cold War?

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank, has researched the Chinese military-affiliated universities, and that has influenced thinking in the American government. A 2018 report called “Picking Flowers, Making Honey” said China was sending students from those universities to Western universities to try to build up its own military technology.

The study suggested that the graduates were targeting the so-called Five Eyes countries that share intelligence: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia. In many cases, the report said, students hid their military affiliations while seeking work in fields with defense applications, like hypersonics.

And we’ve been stupid and corrupt enough to sell them the rope with which they intend to destroy us.