It makes no sense for the U.S. to be educating the scientific and leadership class of a future adversary.
Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs. The U.S. hosted 1.1 million international students last year. Of those, 25% came from China. In 2022 foreign nationals (many of them Chinese) accounted for almost 40% of science doctorates. In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin. Beijing is aggressively cultivating American-educated and American-employed researchers via the Thousand Talents program.
Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?
Universities love Chinese students because they generally pay full freight, often subsidized by the Communist Party state. Universities need that money to feed their ever-expanding bureaucracies, and this dependency corrupts them.