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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32992 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-says-us-will-start-revoking-visas-chinese-students-2025-05-28/

WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday the United States will start "aggressively" revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

If applied to a broad segment of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese university students in the United States, the move could disrupt a major source of income for American schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for U.S. technology companies.

President Donald Trump's administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of wide-ranging efforts to fulfill its hardline immigration agenda. In a statement, Rubio said the State Department will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.

"The U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," he said.

To what extent is this foreign/defense policy, and to what extent is this a fig leaf for prior CW against higher education and foreign students? Shouldn't we be trying to deprive the PRC of human capital? Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this, but a "to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," where "Chinese student" is the only criteria given by the Secretary of State doesn't seem like a good idea.

Edit: A longer quote of Rubio, via Politico (???):

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” he said in a statement. “We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

If anything, this just seems dumber - why is it "Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," rather than "Those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of citizenship?"

Noah Smith makes a good case that international students are good, but it's paywalled. However, here's a quote answering the question of whether foreign students displace or subsidize native students:

All this tuition money from international students allows American universities to pay for more spots for domestic students. In fact, you can see this effect in action. Shih (2017) looked at the effects of various exogenous shocks — baby booms in foreign countries that led to more international enrollment in the 90s, and then 9/11, when increased suspicion of international students led to a sudden drop in enrollment. He found that when more international kids attended a U.S. university, the number of spots for American students also rose:

I focus on a dramatic increase in international enrollment at U.S. graduate programs during the late 1990s, which suddenly reversed following heightened scrutiny of student visa applications in the aftermath of 9/11…The primary findings reveal that international students actually raise domestic enrollment. Preferred estimates indicate that 10 additional international students increase domestic enrollment by roughly 8…This positive effect also appears during the bust period…

At the margin universities can charge international students high prices and use the profits to subsidize the cost of enrolling more domestic students…I provide multiple forms of evidence that indicate cross-subsidization underlies the crowd-in effects. The positive impacts appear to be driven by foreign Master's students, who pay full-sticker price tuition…[T]he positive impacts are concentrated on domestic graduate students in academic programs, who require subsidies…[T]he crowd-in effects are most pronounced among public universities which prioritize enrolling domestic students, pricing tuition below cost for state residents, while also charging foreign students tuition rates between 2 and 3 times higher.

If you were to kick out all of America’s 1.1 million international students, Shih’s estimate would suggest that domestic enrollment would fall by 800,000. Even if it were only half or a quarter of that, that’s a substantial number of Americans who wouldn’t get the chance to go to college.

And the burden would fall hardest on state schools, for whom the difference in tuition between foreign and domestic students is highest, and who have already suffered the most from funding cuts. State schools are much more important for uplifting the American working class into the middle class than Harvard or MIT. So by kicking out international students, Trump is depriving the working class of life-changing educational opportunities.

Some non-zero number of 'Chinese students' are also Chinese spies or CCP operatives.

Do you object to the government excluding them?

No, I object to the government excluding human capital we'd otherwise poach, especially if we're in a de facto Cold War with China. Prior to the Nazis expelling and marginalizing Jewish scientists, Nobel Prizes were predominately won by German scientists/institutions; since WWII, Nobel prizes have been predominately won by US scientists/institutions. China has a lot of brains and, therefore, a lot of brainpower - we should be trying to get their best and brightest. Also, money - if Chinese families want to subsidize Americans' education, let them. By all means, screen for CCP connections, but don't emphasize "Chinese" over "CCP!"

By all means, screen for CCP connections, but don't emphasize "Chinese" over "CCP!"

All Mainland Chinese (except babies I guess) have the risk factor of "has been brought up in a totalitarian state's education system" and most have the additional risk factor of "has family in the power of a notorious hostage-taker".

The Jews fleeing the Nazis have some important distinguishing characteristics - they had a reason to despise the country they fled, they weren't brought up in the Hitlerjugend, and they didn't have the hostage problem because generally they brought their families and AIUI Hitler mostly didn't do that kind of trick anyway. Refugees from China are indeed a better deal, but that's a trickle, not the flood we currently have.

family in the power of a notorious hostage-taker

Are there verified incidents of the CCP extorting expats this way? I've seen fears that it's something the CCP could do, but not examples of the CCP doing it.

Can't find the original ABC (as in, the Australian state broadcaster) articles I read (I think I might have seen a bit on TV too, back when I watched TV) with trivial effort, but a minute's searching turned up a couple of links.

If you really want more, I can look for the originals, I guess. But yeah, it's reasonably-common (common enough, at least, for expats who aren't explicitly extorted to still fear it).

screen for CCP connections

I'm doubtful we're executing on this effectively.

There's also a pretty big difference between an 18-year-old spending 6 figures to go to a state school whose uncle happens to be well-connected to the party in a rural province, and a 26-year-old grad student with a fuzzy past going into [insert military relevant field] at [insert top tier school for that field].

No doubt though that doesn't really speak to our counter-intelligence capabilities. Perhaps if we had less recent history of CCP connected honeypots or chauffeurs I'd have more confidence in our screening abilities.

Absent confidence in our capabilities, I'm unbothered by a finer net with more bycatch.

I'd hazard a guess that bad actors are getting past the gate-keepers, but the Secretary of State saying "Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” rather than "The U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party" doesn't inspire confidence the administration will take a more intelligent approach.

No, but I'd expect them to catch more bad actors while also increasing the the bycatch.

Or perhaps the PRC will change tactics and induce non-citizens to do these things.

They have far less ability to do this. Forcing them to play on hard mode is a win.

Good point.

Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this

I don't see much of concern there.

"For too long, Harvard has let the Chinese Communist Party exploit it," a White House official told Reuters on Friday, adding the school had "turned a blind eye to vigilante CCP-directed harassment on-campus."

Very likely the victims of the alleged harassment are Chinese citizens. I'm sure they'll be safer from the CCP if deported back to China.

Former Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was scrutinized by a Trump program started in 2018 called the China Initiative, which was focused on fighting Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft and investigated researchers and universities over whether they disclosed financial ties to Beijing.

He was convicted in 2021 of lying about his ties to China in connection with federally funded research. In April, he became a full-time professor, at a Chinese university.

Process crimes.

U.S. lawmakers from both parties have expressed worries about the efforts by Beijing-linked student associations to monitor political activities. In April 2024, a Harvard student activist was physically ejected from an event by a Chinese exchange student - not faculty or security staff - for interrupting a speech by China's Ambassador Xie Feng.

Oh noes, "student activists" can't shout down speakers they don't like.

He was convicted in 2021 of lying about his ties to China in connection with federally funded research.

Process crimes.

Yes. And this is perhaps the one kind of process crime I want enforced. You can work for a foreign government. You just have to truthfully report that. Some people refuse to do this, outing themselves as bad actors.

The underlying idea is that foreigners are superior to Americans and thus Americans need to be protected from any interaction with foreigners, which will benefit foreigners at the expense of Americans. Trade between foreigners and Americans makes foreigners richer and Americans poorer. Foreigners studying at American universities are "stealing" our technology.

The underlying idea is that foreigners are superior to Americans

I can bravely assert that I believe that at least one foreigner is superior to at least one American at at least one measurable-and-relevant skill.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Lmao, there is no way this order survives as written its first brush with the legal system. This is textbook discrimination and the way they are phrasing it only makes their life harder.

Banning entry to people with connections to hostile foreign political organizations is pretty standard practice in Burgerland, and has been forever. If you ever immigrated to the United States, you would have to sign a bunch of forms swearing up and down that you are not an SS officer (they haven’t updated them in a while). It looks like it only bans students have actual CPC membership or connections to the party, not just anyone from China. Now, you could argue that’s just a cover story, and you might be right, but the legality would depend on how the order is written and enforced.

I thought that the Immigration and Nationality Act gave extensive power to POTUS to discriminate between non-citizens on the sole basis of his judgement that their entry may be "detrimental to the interests of the United States".

In particular, it seems entirely appropriate that you would decide to ban entry to anyone from an enemy nation. It's going to be hard to argue that the law wasn't written with that in mind.

You might argue the pretense of nationality is flimsy and that China isn't an enemy nation, but the courts don't make the foreign policy of the United States.

Eh, firstly IANAL and also my knowledge only extends to rudimentary UK law, at least under our system there is literally no way this survives its first brush with the Equality Act 2010 (which is a bit like our version of the Civil Rights act in the US but less extreme) so assumed this would fail on similar grounds in the US but if you don't have even that then yeah, it's hard to see what could be done. I guess the long term consequences to the USA will be the only real feedback here...

You don't think Trump v. Hawaii is instructive here?

There is certainly espionage happening that needs to be dealt with, but the wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that implementation of this policy will, like most things to come out of this administration, be indiscriminate, haphazard, amateurish, and probably lead to a worse outcome than if nothing had been done at all. If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds. However smart you think white kids from the midwest are, they aren't going to become ubermenschen who are worth 4 Chinese apiece just because we banned affirmative action and are kicking out all the international students.

The best policy is probably to a) maximally leverage domestic talent, b) allow foreign STEM students, but require that they be selected purely on the basis of academic merit and set up incentives such that almost all of them stay after graduating, and c) issue work visas on the basis of actual talent (offered salary is a close enough proxy).

That's not what we've been doing, of course. We have, instead, been deliberately sandbagging domestic talent, allowing universities to admit academically unimpressive foreigners as a source of cash, letting or sometimes forcing actually impressive foreign students to return home after graduation, and dealing out H-1B visas through a lottery for which an entry-level IT guy can qualify.

Against that backdrop, there's probably quite a lot of room to kick out foreign students and still produce a net improvement by eliminating affirmative action and tweaking the rules on H-1B and O-1 visas.

I think "the system is very far from the Pareto frontier" is not really justification for a specific course of action.

Yes, there is room to produce a net improvement, that doesn't mean this particular strategy is likely to be so, especially given the quality of execution we've seen so far.

What the above poster is claiming and what I think is more accurate is that rather than foreign students “taking spots” from domestic students, instead there is a synergistic effect where more-profitable foreign students essentially underwrite less-profitable domestic students. Like how health care takes profits from healthy people (and lucky people) to pay for poor people (and unlucky people). If you take away foreign money, you actually hurt domestic students! Universities will shrink their advanced degree programs due to funding shortfalls rather than expand access to domestic applicants. Making this an own-goal (at least in absolute numbers)

If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds.

Depending on the amount of espionage we could in fact and quite confidently say we would win if we blocked Chinese nationals from all US STEM.

Wet streets don't cause rain, and top-ranked schools don't cause good students. If China didn't need our schools, their nationals wouldn't be here. If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country. There is an alternative explanation, which I'll address in a moment.

There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.

There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

Anymore, be it either true success from China or paper success, there is no reason for their nationals to be allowed continued participation in US STEM. I do agree this plan will be haphazard and amateurish, but not truly indiscriminate, as their nationals in US STEM should be indiscriminately and unceremoniously expelled to the last. But we could reach a happy medium with reciprocity: they can have, given the difference in populations, 1 student in our schools for every 5 we have in theirs.

but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

How do you square this with the top level comment's economic argument that on net, foreign students' tuition results in over half a million more domestic students enrolling than in the counterfactual?

America in 1900 had open borders with the entire world except for China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act had an exception for an unlimited number of Chinese students. In fact, starting in 1908 the US government even used the money it got from China in the Boxer Indemnity to pay for the education of Chinese students in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Indemnity_Scholarship

The politicians of 1908 America wanted to keep America white, but they didn't share the zero-sum chud mindset that a Chinese getting an education is the reason your cousin Trevor is working at Wal-Mart.

Yeah, what happened in China after that? With all that American-educated Elite Human Capital™ the country must have flourished.

Oh, right.

The quasi-westernized person of color raises hackles at the truth because his world swings upon the selective white humility he doesn't recognize as racism. Those WASP "EHCs" are sadistically racist, they're just so good at obfuscating it the person of color, only familiar with the boorish sort of racism from his countrymen, mistakes it for humility. Every measure of their ostensible praise is patronization, you cannot sing in their peculiar timbre the delights of folks of color without feeling to the marrow that infinite satisfaction in certainty of superiority at being born white. The most belligerent Xitter 1488-er can't begin to apprehend such intrinsic belief in white supremacy. I'll hold up my media literacy certificate and put on my serious hat, have you seen the movie Get Out? It's 104 minutes of literally this point. I digress. He knows the boorish racism and he conflates it with what he sees in America, not as substantive argument but as an appeal to aesthetic and a subconscious plea to mother and father WASP EHC to intervene. Unfortunately for him, though fortunately for greater discourse, the surging right no longer cares about being impugned by aesthetic.

I myself, as an enlightened centrist, never cared.

So you bring out the typical and lazy responses. "Cousin Trevor" or "Cousin Billy Bob" no, it's not the pejorative strawmen about people in very blue-collar occupations or the perpetually unemployed indolent who would have a spot at MIT if only they kept out foreigners. It's about what we know for a fact:

  1. All compulsory American education is weighted against white male students

  2. All non-vocational institutions of higher learning in the US are weighted against white male students

  3. All STEM employment in the US is weighted against white male applicants

  4. And I'll throw in a corollary #4, US corporations hire vast numbers of Indians because, chiefly, it's the closest thing to legal slavery

Nobody is saying the physics genius with a special understanding of reality is being kept out. Men of such stature are defined by their persistence in the face of adversity, they will get in, whatever it takes. What we are saying is most men don't know their calling, they choose a career and it becomes their calling. There are men who feel no calling to medicine but who would have made superb surgeons, same with civil engineers or simply as research assistants. But they've gone through #1 and they're in the process or they've finished #2 and they see #3 rushing toward them and they choose a field or employer where the hostility of modernity toward them appears least present. 70 years ago a bunch of men weren't doing nothing, "twiddling their thumbs" while they waited for Computer Science to exist. They chose among the options they had, and now there are many options.

Here's a question, how many South and East Asians now work at Microsoft? Here's another question, what's going on with Windows 11?

Oh. Oh God.

Fuck me, look at the output of that Elite Human Capital™!

I wonder why white guys might second-guess a job at Microsoft. Aside from knowing they'll have to make it through the gauntlet of interviews where, again, the policy is "Come up with literally any reason possible to not hire white men." In the rarity they do get hired, their reward is working with and for South Asians, Indians, who will only promote other Indians. "They should just deal with it." No, they just take low-visible-prestige jobs in small outfits and regional corporations with comparable compensation given massively lower costs of living and real estate. And some of them are unspecific geniuses, because there are more than 350 million people in this country and even at third sigma above that's quite a few. They didn't all go to Ivies, and they aren't all in STEM.

You know what else? Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals, and I can provide you the exact number of acceptable instances for that to happen, the country over, totaling every student at every institution: zero.

America exists for Americans. If a Chinese national good enough on academic merit for Harvard wants to come here, renounce his citizenship, and pledge to help us root out CCP spies, by all means take him. Pay for everything, give him a pile of gold, we want him, he is elite. Objectively, for a university to take a Chinese national over an American and provide them with qualifications they take back home is a cost that will not be recouped. That is the rule, we do benefit from elite talent coming to this country as long as they stay. The experiment of taking in foreign nationals and sending them out with an American education in some hope of our later benefit has been an empiric failure. For decades almost every aspiring Mexican Technocrat got a US education, shall we check in on how we've both benefited?

(I'll let you imagine the cartel-chainsawed corpses.)

I will compliment you, though. By commenting here you prove yourself more astute than Hanania. He is a person who is notable in this sphere solely for being notable. He was relatively early on X, and that is the only compliment he could get from me, because if he fielded his ideas here first they would be trashed, because he did field them here years ago and they were trashed. I would trust him quoting you over you quoting him. The follower count is no endorsement, EHC knows this, many such cases.

What is the evidence that admitting foreign students is taking spots away from domestic students, rather than subsidizing them as Noah Smith claims? Why should we even be trying to increase the enrollment of (normie) white students when all making college education quasi-compulsory has done is inflate the minimum credentials needed to get a decent job and waste a bunch of people's time and money? It has never been easier to get an education in whatever subject you want on your own or start your own company, so to say that the weak (by world standards) form of discrimination that white students face in school is depriving them of opportunities they need to make something of themselves seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Their ancestors, the generation that produced all the marvelous inventions that underpin modern life, had it far harder. They couldn't study electrical or chemical engineering or computer science because they had to go out and invent those fields from scratch themselves, after spending their childhoods translating Latin in unventilated schoolhouses. The only thing students today want for is purpose, and that is not something that tinkering with college admissions is going to resolve.

As for the value of educating foreigners who do not intend to stay, it consists chiefly in the spread of liberal American values to the elite of neutral or enemy nations, destabilizing governments that are hostile to us and creating a naturally pro-American constituency and reserve of goodwill that can be drawn from in the event of a geopolitical crisis. We are also implicitly holding the children of high officials in China, South Korea, India, etc. hostage should a conflict develop with their home countries. In medieval times, you usually had to beat sombody in a war to get that kind of deal, but today they come here willingly.

Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals

Again, zero-sum fallacy.

overlooked geniuses

We wuz kangs and sheet.

More effort and less…sneering? Mockery? Than this, please.

There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.

The gulf between the West and the Rest was greater then.

Some nations may not have come as far as they think but China definitely isn't one of them. Even if we do the whole DR special pleading thing and assume that Asiatic bugmen are worth less than one intrepid Western autistic genius no matter what the overall IQ score says , no one can deny that China has the numbers, at least close human capital, and doesn't seem to be doing badly enough that Western quality is guaranteed a win.

Thé US population is also far older than it was at the peak of the empire and can’t afford to be turning away talented youngsters to maintain its edge.

Obviously I don’t know how many of these youngsters are ‘talented’ vs ‘cheating’, and how many of them are spies, but brain drain is a tried and tested way of keeping empires afloat.

Were those empires successful in maintaining their empire with foreign brains?

It would seem the better plan would be

We are not about to send bring American Asian boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian American boys ought to be doing for themselves.

The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.

If you're using the latter ottoman and tsarist empires as your models, that's kinda telling. Neither was a particularly fantastic place to live, were intellectually and culturally stagnant, and were so politically unstable they suffered fairly frequent and serious revolutionary insurrections.

Yes because they were part of the empire.

I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.

If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?

Yes because they were part of the empire.

I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.

Chinese-Americans have been part of the empire since the 1850's, longer than Italians, Poles, or Jews.

If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?

The Romans system worked for over four centuries (taking the Social War as the starting point) far longer than any of us expect the American one to, individual cases of betrayal aside.

There were Jews in America in the 1700s.

I don't think anyone is talking about excluding Chinese-Americans.

The topic was Chinese from China.

I don't expect us to have the determination to last over four centuries, we'll skip directly to the betrayal.

The high-IQ American boys you think are twiddling their thumbs because Chang took their college spot and job don't exist. Unemployment is low and the non-employed are mostly low human capital who don't feel like working.

What American boys? AFAIK American boys are mostly achieving except for those at the bottom- you’d need more American boys to match. Good luck convincing the girl next door to breed.

If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country

Consider that countries are subject to pressures other than maximising innovation. Letting internationally-minded high-openness intellectuals out could be a win-win proposition for China and the recipient: the target country gets to capture their intellectual output, while China is rid of someone who would make trouble/destabilise the system/gets to evaporatively cool its citizenry into relative complacency.

There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans? From what I have seen, the default seems to be that in STEM, without being subsidised by Chinese non-research MA students, the programmes from BA through PhD would be untenable at their current cost/expense level.

What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans?

It's zero-sum thinking. He thinks a Chinese kid going to university is why his cousin Billy Bob went to trade school.

From the perspective of people actually named Billy Bob, going to trade school is not a bad outcome. Americans who blame immigrants for unemployment usually are upset about NEETs, not hypotheticals who could be in Harvard instead of state U, because they do not think that going to state U is anything to be upset about.

Could this be more about the general pressure put onto the Universities and their funding rather than what it says it's about?

As far as I know, the schools most dependent on tuition from Chinese international students to stay afloat are mid-tier public universities in flyover states, not the most highly ranked, and by extension the most woke, private schools. I suppose Iowa State may still be too progressive for Vance or whoever is the brains of this operation, but I think a better strategy would have been to kneecap the top colleges and then raise up some midwest state schools in their place.

It's not just flyover universities dependent on higher foreign student tuition. Both the CalState and UC systems get tons of money in their masters programs from Chinese students. Top schools (e.g. UCLA, UC Berkley, UCSD) and mid-tier schools (e.g. UC Riverside, CalPoly and CalState LA) would be greatly affected.

How is CalState LA mid-tier?

What exactly would propping up the various State U's in flyover country accomplish? Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League may be at the top, but the entire university system is a cancer. College delenda est.

What exactly would propping up the various State U's in flyover country accomplish?

The Chinese students bring in dollars which they then spend on things which create economic opportunity for the locals.

Fascinating seeing Scott's dark side. Thanks for the links.

If you liked that, then you will love Scott's paranoid rant (that time he got drunk and said everything he really thinks about the Cathedral and the blue tribe) and his leaked e-mail (that time his ex-girlfriend's husband decided to post Scott's private correspondence describing his relationship with the far right).

I'm so curious for the second one but the images won't load, alas.

So these three links don't work for you? They do for me.

More comments

YES YES GIVE ME THE GOSS!!!

Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

I can't see how Chinese students in particular are involved in the latest Israel/Gaza 'terrorist support' fiasco. They usually keep a low profile regarding politics. Ethnic chinese students are often monitored by the CCP in foreign countries for support of Chinese related stuff (Taiwan, Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghurs, Hong Kong etc). Haven't seen any of that flare up recently.

This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

Don't have the state capacity, or haven't tried? What has been tried?

I can't see how Chinese students in particular are involved in the latest Israel/Gaza 'terrorist support' fiasco.

If "terrorist support" is the genuine motivation, why revoke Harvard's ability to sponsor any international student?

This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

This already exists. Private industry has incentives not to let their tech be stolen and not to hire people who will steal it. If they're forced to hire Chinese anyway by anti-discrimination law, then that's the problem, not the immigration per se.

As to research conducted in universities, that's supposed to be a public good that's publicly available in return for being publicly funded by the government.

Private industry has incentives not to let their tech be stolen and not to hire people who will steal it.

Some of the harm is internalised. Not all of it is, which means the incentives aren't as strong as (and thus often produce less-safe responses to tradeoffs than) society would like.

Mainland Chinese students (and some ethnic Chinese 2nd+ generation residents/citizens) have been doing Industrial Espionage for the CCP for ages. This could be justified on that alone if they don't have the state capacity to vet them for access to certain research projects.

There are plenty of subfields in STEM where industrial espionage is not a concern. Pure mathematics or theoretical physics might be subject to someone stealing your paper drafts, but not industrial espionage per se. Likewise, civil engineering.

"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP" is not a super-hard concept to grok. Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship (not that any would do so now before being naturalized in the US) on any research projects which the CCP might be interested in.

Pass a law which makes it easy to exclude Chinese citizens who have not credibly renounced their citizenship

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

G.K. Chesterton, "What I Saw In America":

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. ...They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember, wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

...But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

Do note that this would still force them to put work into making an agent before sending him over, rather than being able to only put work into flipping an expat after he's successfully got a relevant position.

Which means the answer to this:

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

...is basically "anyone deterred by this is someone who can be extorted into working for the CPC and thus is de facto a sleeper agent; this isn't a bug, it's a feature".

"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".

I was thinking more about people who had already decided to do something which pisses off the CCP, like joining Falun Gong or campaigning for human rights.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

From my understanding, the problem with Chinese students spying is not that they get their hands on highly classified projects. The problem is that they get their hands on a lot of much less sensitive projects which then give China a competitive edge.

It is likely that the CCP is already sponsoring the odd fake dissident, but more for reasons of infiltrating the international dissident community than in the expectation that the US will put them on a highly sensitive project.

But the average Chinese student is not some deep cover super spy, but just some average person who is required to do a bit of snooping on the side. "We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.

"We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.

Neither is "we will just ask any potential students to give up their Chinese citizenship and then ten years later when they go back to the Old Country and stay there for good after drip-feeding the information they gathered while here, we'll be completely surprised they did not, in fact, mean it".

I think the CCP is more confident it can deal with "If Li Yu comes back contaminated with running-dog ideology, we can re-educate him to be a model citizen". They had no problem getting Jack Ma to fall in line.

I thought I had read all of Chesterton's work, but I either missed this one or totally forgot about it. Thanks for posting it!

For anyone interested, the full book (~300 folio pages) is available on project guttenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm. It starts with the very in-character line:

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind.

The ... in @HereAndGone's quote misses some of the best lines:

Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex.

Some more gems from the first pages:

Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book.

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.

All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.

I doubt the following still holds true:

The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world.

This line might make a handful of white-nationalists upset:

I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists.

Once you start quoting Chesterton, it's hard to stop 😁 I love his description of newspaper interviews; first, what the headlines put him down as saying:

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American. Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as I have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This is almost avowed translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign — whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.' Here again I hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking.

Second, the difference between the experience of being interviewed (where the reporter is courteous) and the way interviews are written up:

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of highway-robber in print.

Mr. Chesterton is a man without guile so he doesn’t realize the form is actually a trap. Lying on the form is a crime and can get your visa or citizenship revoked. So when the anarchist gets busted by the cops at an anarchist demonstration in New York six months later with his anarchist party card in his pocket, it proves he was lying on the form and out he goes. Even if just “being an anarchist” is not a crime and protected by the first amendment.

Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!

What would these "agents" do?

Chinamen make good immigrants and don’t have ginormous extended families, it doesn’t seem difficult to just bring over the families of high value immigrants- there is, after all, plenty of extra space in flyover. That’s what will eventually happen anyways due to chain migration.

Chinese government could deny exit visas to family members of academics in the US. They have to apply for permission to leave

"If your project has any industrial application of interest to the CCP, assume that any Chinese national is legally obliged to share any information they have access to or can easily obtain with the CCP"

Western govts have the capacity to create a basic screen like this, but for some reason they don't. I wish they did and had even a clown HR'ish rep to run research students through a basic process screen like this and send it up the chain for further analysis if it gets complicated.

some reason

My best guess is that reason comes in the form of black suitcases full of colored rectangles with nice pictures on them.

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