We always knew that, and they always knew that too.
Until recently, we considered this not a factor, because most Chinese students would stay in the US or come back later, so we could get a constant flow of highly trained individuals with most of their training having been financed by someone else.
Now things are changing, globalization is being reverted, and the benefit equation has changed, because now, as those students get back to China, it is now us the ones financing the fixed costs of the educational infrastructure to benefit China.
These are very common. The NYPD and FBI have just now starting busting them up.
Many people don’t know this since they think the the USA’s late imperial citizenship model is universal, but the Chinese state claims global jurisdiction over all Chinese persons and they don’t determine who is a Chinese person on the basis of papers issued by foreign governments.
He's not being denied that because anyone objects to his aims. The problem seems to be his parents, culture and where his family comes from. Now I'll agree with you that the standard for racism is a bit fuzzy these days, but this is clearly going to meet the bar for being called "racist" when it comes to a university education in North America.
These is this entity called the People's Republic of China that is independent of Chinese people culture. That entity is the problem here.
The problem aren't his parents, but the known history of what his government may do to his parents to force him to comply, and yes, the culture that normalized this sort of thing as being ok. You're seriously reaching by calling this racism. Even if "universities" might call it that, that doesn't make the classification sensible or coherent.
- A Taiwanese student
- A Chinese student who grew up in America?
- A Chinese student who grew up in Canada?
- A Chinese student from a Chinese family that immigrated to Mexico?
No? The ethnicities and race are similar for all the above cases. And I don’t think anyone doubts Canada would them in. Showing - race has nothing to do with this equation.
Also, in many ways, it is possibly a mercy to the Chinese student himself; because then he won’t be put in a situation where the Chinese government puts his family (quite literally) at gunpoint.
The more experienced I get, the more I'm convinced the "this should(n't) be obvious" part is the main differentiator between the American and the Chinese system
With hindsight the West might have made a lot of mistakes with how China was engaged. There should have been more serious negotiation to make liberalising their political system part of the package when they got all that investment back in the 90s. Doesn't even need to be any compromise on the Chinese part, just some consensus between the west and the PRC that it shouldn't be a tiny handful of people running the whole show and that this reality should be obvious to everyone. It was a mistake not to be more culturally assertive about making their decision making more transparent and their military governance more democratic. It has been unhelpful to make it all just business dealings.