Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home

Until they agree to play nice, I say arrivederci!

Sorry my bad. I meant 拜拜 (bāibāi)/

Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home

It makes no sense for the U.S. to be educating the scientific and leadership class of a future adversary.

By Mike Gallagher, WSJ

Aug. 19, 2025 4:28 pm ET

President Trump began his second term by picking a fight with an unaccountable leftist dictatorship that is hostile to American values, accustomed to taking advantage of American wealth and actively abetting genocide in Xinjiang. I refer of course to Harvard.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats agreed that our universities were crown jewels of American exceptionalism, and Harvard shone brightest of all. Mr. Trump, however, has an uncanny knack for exposing rotten shibboleths, and recent years have seen top universities unmasked as global far-left patronage networks using research as a smokescreen to prevent scrutiny of campus hate as they aid adversaries like China.

Mr. Trump deserves credit for addressing the corrupt and immoral links between universities like Harvard and the Chinese Communist Party. But the recent deals his administration has cut with Columbia, Brown and other schools don’t go far enough. These settlements consist of impressive but ultimately immaterial fines and vague promises to abide by current laws, which may not last through the next presidential term. There’s a better way: Drastically reduce the number of Chinese nationals enrolled at American universities, especially those studying technology.

Roughly 30% of Harvard’s student body is foreign. At Columbia, that share approaches 40%. America’s finest universities benefit from billions in government grants and tax breaks while admitting fewer Americans every year. Our elite universities need a change of mindset. They should make a priority of educating exceptional Americans and citizens of our partner nations—not our adversaries.

Mr. Trump noted this summer that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” which Joe Biden called “a defining technology of our era.” Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that “you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.”

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. Last fall, a member of the Harvard chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association allegedly assaulted another student protesting a speech by China’s ambassador to the U.S. Not only did the school not punish the student, who was caught on video committing the alleged assault, an academic dean wrote in a letter to that student that his actions were “understandable in that context.”

That incident was one of many. Not long ago, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) and I hosted a secret event at Columbia where we heard from dissident Chinese students who had endured physical assault, spying, coercion and threats to their families. These students complained that administrators at Rutgers, Cornell, Columbia and other elite schools ignored their claims. Wherever Chinese money flows, it has a corrupting influence.

It would be one thing if we could prevent, or even assess, Chinese penetration of American scientific research. In 2023, Stanford paid $2 million to settle a Justice Department claim that it failed to disclose foreign research funding, which campus reporting suggests is only the tip of the iceberg of “Chinese spies at Stanford.” Earlier this summer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, two Chinese nationals at the University of Michigan. Federal prosecutors charged them with smuggling a “potential agroterrorism weapon,” a fungus that can cause serious illness.

The Trump administration doesn’t need to make deals with universities to rebalance the foreign-student population. Visas are the American president’s responsibility, not Harvard’s. The government gave universities leeway with immigration policies that mostly rubber-stamped admissions office decisions, but we can change that.

Refuse to issue student visas to Chinese Communist Party members and their children. Do the same for researchers affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, as well as those who have supported the Seven Sons of National Defense universities and other Chinese institutions connected to the defense sector. Expand the Biden-era law banning Chinese citizens from national labs like Los Alamos to university labs that accept certain grants from the Energy, Defense, and Health and Human Services departments.

Critics will trot out the old canard that we need to admit more Chinese students to spread freedom via cultural exchange. It is a lovely idea but impossible to square with the reality of China today. The Chinese Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Wang Huning, was radicalized, not moderated, by his time at Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a proud Harvard father.

When I was chairman of the House Select Committee on China, a group of university presidents asked me why so many of the party elite want to study at our colleges. I half-joked that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese want to send their youth to the last bastions of true communist ideology. The joke got more laughs than expected because it hit close to home. It is up to the Trump administration to ensure that Beijing doesn’t have the last laugh.

Mr. Gallagher, a Journal contributor, is head of defense for Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. He represented Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District (2017-24) and was chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.