Experts Who Warn of Risks Posed by Chinese Students Are Skeptical of Trump Plan

The F.B.I. has spent decades investigating some professors and students from China suspected of using their studies to secretly spy for their home country. As the Trump administration tries a new, more aggressive effort to stop such activity, experts fear it will do more harm than good for American research.

The plans the State Department announced this past week to revoke visas of some Chinese college students strike even some former spy-hunters as a heavy-handed attempt to solve a more complicated problem.

“The overall number of People’s Republic of China students that actually pose some type of national security risk is relatively low compared to the number of students that will continue to support and further U.S. research,” said Greg Milonovich, a former F.B.I. agent who managed the counterintelligence division’s academic alliance program as well as the national security higher education advisory board.

In announcing the move late Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave few specifics, offering only that the U.S. government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

How that vaguely defined standard will be enforced is not yet clear, but the directive is part of a broad campaign by the Trump administration to force major changes in American higher education. College campuses, administration officials say, are in crisis, and only the federal government is willing and able to fix the problems.

The senior White House adviser Stephen Miller outlined on Friday what the administration viewed as a threat to its interests. “We’re not going to be awarding visas to individuals who have a risk of being engaged in any form of malign conduct in the United States, which of course would include espionage, theft of trade secrets, theft of technology or other actions that would degrade the security of our industrial base,” he said.

Some 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, second only to the number of students from India. Federal authorities have long grappled with the challenge of trying to prevent individuals from within that large group from stealthily siphoning critical technology or expertise to Chinese companies or government officials.

Mr. Milonovich said that American officials had long worried about the risks posed by some Chinese students but that the administration’s most recent push would ultimately harm the advancement of U.S. technology.

Some students arrive in the United States with pre-existing affiliations with Chinese government and intelligence agencies, while “many others are contacted, recruited or co-opted while they are in the U.S. studying,” he said.

The authorities say that is what happened when Yanqing Ye came to study science at Boston University. Ms. Ye, according to an indictment unsealed in 2020, was a lieutenant in the Chinese Army before she arrived in the United States, and as a student in Boston, she continued to carry out assignments for her Chinese superior officers, sending American documents and information to China.

Still, Mr. Milonovich added, given that the United States employs “tremendous numbers” of scientific and technological experts originally from China or other foreign countries, “we need this continued pipeline of intellect and skill.”

Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer who has defended college professors accused or suspected of economic espionage, said that the administration had yet to articulate the national security danger it is trying to avoid, but that it had already succeeded in scaring talented people away from the United States.

“This is a self-defeating and self-destructive strategy, if you can call it a strategy,” he said. “These students fill our labs and they perform all the research. They’re some of the smartest, most talented scientists in America and I have no idea how these labs are going to operate without them.”

F.B.I. officials have long argued that China is engaged in a relentless and far-reaching effort to steal as much scientific expertise as it can from the United States, to benefit Chinese companies and markets. National security officials say that while much of that suspicious activity occurs in the business world, a great deal also goes on among college researchers. To counter that threat, federal agents have for years delivered classified briefings to select college officials, and broader warnings to colleges generally.

While those efforts have produced a significant number of tips and criminal cases, they also have elicited some controversy and distrust between educators and investigators.

In 2018, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, faulted what he called the “naïveté” of some college administrators toward the danger posed by Chinese students, teachers, and researchers.

“The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether it’s professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the F.B.I. has around the country,” he said.

That year, the Justice Department began what it called the China Initiative, to crack down on trade secret theft, including at universities.

Most of the criminal cases that emerged from the initiative focused on professors rather than students. Yet not all of those indictments won convictions in court, and critics accused federal prosecutors and agents of casting a cynical eye at people of Chinese descent. In the face of such criticism, the Biden administration shuttered the initiative in 2022, though it continued to investigate possible crimes by Chinese academics.

The security concerns around Chinese students did not disappear, and in fact go back decades. In 1998, a congressional report warned that the F.B.I. “has inadequate resources in light of the extensive numbers” of visitors from China, including “students, diplomats, business representatives and others who may be involved in intelligence and military-related technology transfer operations in the United States.”

Current and former officials have said that the resources to monitor and investigate possible student spies only face further strain given the administration’s focus on immigration. It has pressed hundreds of F.B.I. agents into duty backing up Department of Homeland Security agents seeking to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants.