The lives of the nearly 280,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. were upended when the Trump administration announced it would be mass revoking visas over alleged connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But recently, the students have begun amassing unlikely allies: dissidents against the CCP.  

The dissidents would normally be expected to support U.S. policies against the CCP whole-heartedly. But this time, they say, the federal government’s newly announced plan to revoke Chinese students’ visas has cast the dragnet too broadly that many innocent people may become victims. “We have been fighting for human rights our whole lives,” said Wan Yanhai, one of the dissidents. “We have an obligation to speak up against any human rights violations, be it in China or in the U.S.” 

State Secretary Marco Rubio’s announcement, which mainly puts Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” in the crosshairs, is a culmination of rising U.S. national security concerns about Beijing amid rising anti-China sentiment in recent years. Chinese students, who had been the largest population of international students in the U.S. since 2009 until they yielded the spot to Indians last year, have been taking the brunt of the anti-China attacks.

In 2018 when President Trump kicked off his first trade war against China, the then U.S. Senator Rubio asked Christopher Wray, the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), at a congressional hearing about “counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students.” 

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In Trump’s first term, the U.S. launched the China Initiative, largely putting all Chinese scholars and researchers under scrutiny for economic espionage (the program was ended by President Biden in 2022 partly due to its ineffectiveness, though Congressional Republicans are trying to revitalize it).   

In 2023, Florida passed a law banning public universities in the state from hiring students from China and a few other countries to do research work.

Incendiary public remarks by politicians have piled on the pressure. For example, former Virginia Congressman Bob Good declared that “I don’t think we ought to have Chinese nationals in institutions of higher learning,” and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Pompeo said that “the Chinese Communist Party is inside every major American university today with research dollars and with their students.” 

What “connections?”

But no previous policies against Chinese students are as broadly cast as Rubio’s plan. While not every Chinese student majors in STEM, commonly considered as “critical fields,” in a one-party country like China where nearly 100 million people are members of the CCP, the party’s influence reaches into every corner of people’s lives. Connections to the party, loosely defined, could implicate most Chinese citizens. 

Wan, a veteran activist renowned for his work calling for equal rights for AIDS patients and the LGBT community in China, knows how a “connection” could be made even inadvertently. In middle school, after he was selected to participate in a math competition, his classmates put a Youth League Emblem in his hand and told him he was now a league member. In high school, driven by his budding pursuit of democracy, Wan wrote a letter to the principal to renounce his league membership. He was reprimanded in front of teachers and students at the school. 

From there, he became a fixture at student pro-democracy rallies in college. He survived the bloodshed against pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, was put in prison in the 1990s for defending AIDS patients. Wan, who lives in New York now, was confronted by pro-China students when he attended a rally supporting the Hong Kong democracy movement in 2019. 

Still, Wan believes Chinese students in the U.S. who take assignments and money from the CCP should be punished through the law, and those who simply express their political views should be protected by freedom of speech. “Geopolitical wrestling between the U.S. and China shouldn’t take young people’s dreams and future as a pawn,” he said. 

Xiong Yan, a former student leader at Tiananmen Square who had then served in the U.S. Army for 27 years until he retired in 2021, echoes Wan. When he was running for Congress in New York in 2022, Xiong became a direct victim of the CCP’s transnational oppression. According to court documents, a CCP agent hired a private investigator in New York to disrupt his campaign by, among other tactics, intimidation through violence. “Beat him, beat him until he cannot run for election,” the agent was caught saying in a voice message. 

Another person working for the CCP in New York to collect information about Chinese dissidents has allegedly sent instant photos and videos of Xiong’s activities with a compromised camera phone that was directly connected with the authorities in China. 

Xiong believes the CCP has been using Chinese students and immigrants in the U.S. as “chess pieces” to serve its “evil purposes”. But he pointed out that many Chinese students who may have “connections” with the CCP also espouse American values. “A sweeping policy would shut many of these young people out of the door to democracy and freedom,” Xiong said.    

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Wang Juntao, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen square protests and chair of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of China, a Flushing-based Chinese dissidents organization,  blamed China’s National Security Law for putting Chinese students in a thorny situation. The 2015 law obliges all Chinese citizens to support the government’s intelligence efforts and provide assistance when asked. “The American government hasn’t figured out how to deal with this ‘people’s war,’ so it has to take a one-size-fit-all approach,” said Wang. “But many Chinese students come to the U.S. because they like this country.”      

“Little Pinkies” v. “White Paper” Protestors

Rubio’s concerns about campus safety are not baseless. In 2020, the Department of State  designated the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a sprawling network with at least 150 chapters on U.S. campuses, as a tool of the CCP to oppress dissidents. 

Last year, former Berklee College of Music Chinese student Xiaolei Wu was sentenced to nine months in prison and three years of supervised release by a federal court in Boston for stalking and threatening another Chinese student who posted fliers around campus to call for freedom and democracy in China. Wu had told the victim that he had reported her to authorities in China who would “greet” the victim’s family there. Wu was released early and sent back to China in October in what was believed to be a prisoner swap between the U.S. and China. 

The long shadow of surveillance has prompted many Chinese students in the U.S. to keep quiet when it comes to social and political topics about China, or shield their faces behind masks when participating in pro-democracy activities.

But this incident and others show that many Chinese students are trying to push China toward democracy from afar. The movement can be traced back to more than 40 years ago.  In 1983 the overseas Chinese democracy movement began in New York, led by Wang Bingzhang, who had just received his PhD degree from Canada’s McGill University sponsored by the Chinese government, and is now serving a life sentence in China. Most recently, when China’s draconian covid measures triggered so-called “white paper” protests, rallies and vigils held by Chinese students erupted on many campuses in the U.S. to echo the protesters’ demands for more freedom.

“People like Rubio and Pompeo, they kept saying ‘we should distinguish between the Chinese government and Chinese people.’ But they have never followed their own words,” said Miji, a volunteer with Zephyr Society, a New York-based salon for young Chinese to discuss social movements in China. Zephyr strictly prohibits participants from taking photos or videos at their events and suggests they not use their real names for safety reasons. But Miji, who was a student himself not long ago and had participated in the “white paper” rallies in New York, said the across-the-board fears of being reported by fellow students may be exaggerated. “Most Chinese students are apolitical. Few really support the CCP,” said Miji, who asked to be identified only by his first name. 

Not everyone on the pro-democracy side agrees with his assessment. Sophie Luo, a Washington D.C.-based human rights activist and the wife of the human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi who is imprisoned in China, said she believes the majority of Chinese students have been brainwashed by the CCP. But she blames the U.S. for not better educating its students. Luo went to college and lived in the U.S. from 2000 to 2004, but says the experience didn’t help her better understand democracy. “Most STEM major students like myself had no time or means to receive civic education,” said Luo. “Politically I was the same indifferent person when I left the U.S. as when I came here.” 

But Ding, when visiting Luo in the U.S. 25 years ago, spent most of his time observing the U.S. legal system in action by sitting on the audience’s benches at court trials. The experience was the early seed that eventually sent him on a tough journey to try to establish a civil society in China. Luo, who later became an activist herself, moved back to the U.S. in 2013 after Ding was arrested. She sees little improvement in the ways that Chinese students in the U.S. interact with the democratic system in the past couple of decades. “They have been brainwashed by China and are ‘little pinkies,’” said Luo, referring to a popular nickname for young nationalistic Chinese. “But they have no incentive nor opportunities to learn about democracy.” 

Luo, who has just founded an organization called Alliance for Citizens Rights to push for civil society in China, like her husband did, said she plans to mobilize members of congress to launch mandatory democracy education for Chinese students in the U.S. “It’s not wise to pour the baby out with the bathwater,” said Luo. “The key is to help turn Chinese students into a power serving democracy.” 

Xiong agrees with this. He said his own organization, the Xiong Yan Institute for Peace and Unity, also plans to reach out to the U.S. government. “We need to help them understand, if you want to ‘make America great again,’ you shouldn’t deprive young talents the opportunities to learn democracy,” said Xiong. “The competition between the U.S. and China is to compete for the future, and it’s indeed a competition for young people because the future belongs to them.” 

Wan’s concerns are beyond Chinese students. “Such a broad scoped policy means their target is not limited to students, and many people may wonder what they are going to do next,” said Wan, who is pondering the idea of taking legal action to fight against the policy.  

Meanwhile, the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, an organization formed by five Chinese American lawyers in Trump’s first term to defend Chinese Americans from discrimination, is preparing its own lawsuit against Rubio’s plan. 

The organization declined to comment for this story citing the upcoming lawsuit. But in a Wechat post regarding its plan, the organization noted Rubio’s actions are only one of the series of laws and policies restraining the rights of Chinese in the U.S. “This reminds us of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act,” the article states. “We thought that history has been buried by time, but now it is rapidly surging up once again with a different mask.” 

Even with the risks of political repercussions and a shared opposition to the CCP, the Chinese dissidents see the crackdown on students as dangerous and worth fighting. 

“But anti-CCP shall not violate human rights either,” Wan said. And Xiong offered a personal reason.  “I have eight children all born in the U.S. I have to speak up for their future,” he said.