Washington creates McCarthyist campus climate

The US State Department said on Wednesday that the country has revoked the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese nationals under a May 29 presidential proclamation to suspend entry from China of students and researchers deemed security risks. Chad Wolf, the acting head of the US Department of Homeland Security, had previously accused China of abusing student visas to exploit US academia. According to him, the Chinese graduate students and researchers have "ties to China's military fusion strategy" and may steal and otherwise appropriate "sensitive research" in the US.

The denigrating and demonizing of Chinese students and researchers in the United States is just part of Washington's strategy to drastically cut academic and scientific exchanges with China, which the US now deems as a fast growing threat to its superiority in technology. To underscore how urgently steps have to be taken to counter China in the sector, the US president once even said that "almost every student that comes over to this country (from China) is a spy". And FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed his agency opens a new counterintelligence investigation related to Chinese espionage every 10 hours, which has led to several prosecutions of academics－mostly involving tax evasion, grant fraud or making false statements about overseas affiliations.

But the anti-China rhetoric has inevitably led to rising discrimination against some 360,000 Chinese nationals studying in the US. They, together with those of Chinese origin, have often been victims of the rampant racism and xenophobia in the US.

The scare strategy that the US politicians have adopted reminds people of the dark days of McCarthyism in the 1950s, when waves of investigations were conducted to ferret out supposed communists in government agencies. It also bears resemblance to the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 19th century, which prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers into the US.

Yet the US witch hunt against ethnic Chinese has only heaped shame on it, and dashed any illusion people may have had about it being a welcoming society.

US scientists have warned of a Chinese brain drain as the crackdown on alleged foreign interference at universities drives away scientists of Chinese descent. Over the past several decades, Chinese talents studying and working in the US have been a driving force behind its technological supremacy globally. In most high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, Asian immigrants, mainly Chinese and Indians, dominate. Alienating Chinese talents in the US by giving them a bad name will not make America great again, instead it will only weaken the country's innovation capabilities in the long run.