Members of the CSSA leadership quickly fired off a public statement on the group’s WeChat account, including the part about contacting the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles. For them, the reference to the consulate conveyed gravitas and the seriousness of the situation. For outsiders, it made the students look like stooges of a foreign government. Lisa felt it was a mistake, but they had to move on.
The CSSA planned to hold a small protest along the school’s Library Walk, a stretch of sidewalk where student groups frequently hand out flyers and put up posters for different causes. Lisa was put in charge of preparing material for their informational posters. She didn’t know much about the Dalai Lama growing up. She had heard a little about him during the 2008 riots in Tibet, but only really began to read about his work while preparing the posters.
In doing that research, Lisa decided to use Western sources because the Chinese ones were “really biased.” As she read on, she found that she agreed with many of the Dalai Lama’s current teachings about compassion and tolerance. But she also felt that his pristine public image in the West obscured his political past, such as the fact that he and his organization took millions of dollars of financing from the CIA during the 1960s.21
The posters Lisa ended up creating had titles such as “Why Is the Dalai Lama Controversial?” and “Monk or Politician?” They displayed copies of declassified U.S. intelligence documents on the CIA’s payment to him and quotes from Western historians about institutional serfdom in Tibet during the Dalai Lama’s rule there.
On the appointed day, members of the CSSA propped those posters up along the Library Walk and tried to engage passing students in conversation. The reception was not always friendly.
“Tons of people doubted or questioned us. Whatever we would say about the Dalai Lama, they’d bring up things from Chinese history. They’d say, ‘Well, can you explain Tiananmen to me?’” she told me. “They don’t actually care about this. The feeling I got from them was, ‘No matter what you say, it’s ridiculous, because you’re from an authoritarian country and you don’t have freedom of speech.’”
It was a frustrating line of argument for the Chinese students. Lisa wanted to tell them that China had changed a lot, that there was a kind of freedom of speech even if it had limits, and that she wasn’t ignorant of the problems in her own country. But it was difficult to get that across in a back-and-forth with students who believed her to be fundamentally brainwashed. They weren’t going to change too many minds here, and the UCSD administration had said early on that it would not consider canceling the appearance by His Holiness.
Still, looking back on the event, Lisa was proud of what they achieved.
“I felt like it was successful,” she told me. “If there’s debate, then that’s a success, because at least we were able to show them another side of things.”
“WHOLE-OF-SOCIETY THREAT”
If students like Lisa had a hard time convincing their fellow students they weren’t brainwashed, they were going to have an even harder time convincing the FBI they weren’t spies. On February 13, 2018, the heads of the six major intelligence agencies sat down opposite the Senate Intelligence Committee for a hearing on threats posed by Russian hackers, North Korean missiles, and other “worldwide threats.” But when it came time for Senator Marco Rubio to pose a question to the panel, he zeroed in on a new topic.
“What, in your view,” he asked FBI director Christopher Wray, “is the counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics?”
Wray launched into a discussion of China’s use of “nontraditional collectors”—students, professors, and scientists—to infiltrate U.S. academic institutions and gather things of value. He said that reports of these activities were coming in from nearly all the FBI field offices, covering all major disciplines.
“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have—which we all revere—but they’re taking advantage of it,” Wray told the committee. “So one of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end. And I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.”
On the one hand, Wray was stating the obvious: all countries try to use the assets at their disposal to conduct espionage on each other. There happen to be a large number of Chinese students at U.S. universities, many of them working in cutting-edge fields, and China’s spy agencies are certainly trying to turn some of those students into intelligence assets. The United States intelligence community would be derelict in its duties if it wasn’t trying to do the same thing.
But Wray’s choice of words—“whole-of-society threat”—set off alarm bells in some quarters. That phrase seemed to cast suspicion on all Chinese students, and perhaps even Chinese Americans. A coalition of prominent Asian American community organizations wrote an open letter to Wray expressing “feelings of both anger and sadness” at his remarks, warning that such generalizations will lead to racial profiling against Chinese people.
The groups had reason to be worried. In the years prior to Wray’s remarks, a string of prominent Chinese American researchers had been investigated, arrested, and charged with espionage, only to have the cases against them prove unfounded. The public humiliation and damage to their reputations led several scientists to simply relocate back to China afterward.
But the FBI chief’s testimony crystallized a growing trend in Washington, D.C.: the tendency to view Chinese students as pawns or puppets working on behalf of the CCP, suppressing free speech on American soil or stealing our advanced technology. It was a transition that reflected the sea change in the balance of power between the two countries. When China was poor and weak, these students were welcomed as aspiring immigrants or the seeds of China’s democratic future. But as the People’s Republic became a legitimate strategic counterweight to U.S. power, the students were looked upon with suspicion, as foreign agents or intellectual leeches, sapping the United States of its hard-earned edge in advanced technology.
Those sentiments came to a rolling boil during an Oval Office meeting in the spring of 2018. With backlash against the students mounting and a trade war looming, President Trump’s influential policy adviser Stephen Miller pushed a draconian proposal: a full ban on student visas for all Chinese citizens. Miller had staked out a position as one of Trump’s far-right advisers, and he was instrumental in shaping President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. According to a report in the Financial Times, he argued that along with hurting China, a ban on the students would also be a blow to the elite Ivy League universities and their faculty, who comprised some of Trump’s harshest critics.
With President Trump undecided on the proposal, he convened a meeting with both Miller and his ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, the former governor of Iowa. Ambassador Branstad pushed back against the ban, arguing that it would do more damage to small colleges in places like Iowa, which had come to rely on the students. Chinese enrollment at the University of Iowa has skyrocketed after the financial crisis, and by 2015 Chinese students were paying an estimated $70 million in tuition and adding over $100 million to the local economy. Over the course of the Oval Office meeting, President Trump came to side with Ambassador Branstad, who himself had graduated from the University of Iowa. Turning to his ambassador, the president reportedly joked, “Not everyone can go to Harvard or Princeton, right, Terry?”
Instead of the outright ban, he opted for a more targeted approach. In May of 2018, the Trump administration issued new restrictions on visas for Chinese graduate students in fields such as robotics, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing. Validity of their visas would be reduced from five years to one. In a tweet following the new restrictions, Senator Rubio hailed the decision as a “great move!” He described Chinese student visas as “weapons” that the government uses in a concerted campaign to “steal