“I need to get my degree safely,” the student told me. A Chinese national and doctoral candidate in social sciences at an American university, she’d recently heard that her social-media messages might be checked at the U.S. border. “Safely,” for her, meant a series of measures to avoid anything incriminating: She downloaded the end-to-end-encrypted messaging app Signal and set her messages to disappear after 24 hours, and she also no longer sends sensitive links in group chats—that is, anything involving Donald Trump, Israel, or DEI. She’s not the only one with a new sense of anxiety. Whenever her Chinese classmates talk about American politics at the campus cafeteria or in school, she told me, they lower their voices.
学生告诉我：“我需要安全地获得学位。”她是一名美国大学社会科学的中国国家和博士候选人，最近听说她的社交媒体信息可能会在美国边境检查。对她而言，“安全”是指避免任何罪名的一系列措施：她下载了端到端的消息传递应用程序信号，并将她的消息设置为24小时后消失，并且她也不再在小组聊天中发送敏感链接，即涉及唐纳德·特朗普，以色列或dei的任何东西。她不是唯一一个有新的焦虑感的人。每当她的中国同学在校园自助餐厅或学校谈论美国政治时，她告诉我，他们都会降低声音。
The day she and I spoke, June 10, was the final day of China’s university-entrance exams. She had been watching videos on the Chinese social-media platform Weibo of students back home being cheered on to the examination venues by crowds, of flowers being handed out, and of police asking motorists not to honk so that students could concentrate on their test. She said it felt as though the whole society was behind them, willing their success.
我和我讲话的那一天是6月10日，是中国大学参与考试的最后一天。她一直在中国社交媒体平台上观看录像带，这是学生们回家的录像带，这是由人群，鲜花和警察要求驾车者不要鸣叫的考试场所欢呼的，以便学生可以专注于考试。她说，整个社会都在他们身后，愿意他们的成功。
Earlier that day, she had received an email from her U.S. university department that provided an emergency plan for sudden visa revocation. The memo included a recommendation to make a contact list of immigration attorneys, and a notice to save both digital and printed copies of the plan. The email even came with guidance on securing temporary housing, implying that students needed a backup plan. Seeking clarification, students were told that they were responsible for covering any costs.
那天早些时候，她收到了美国大学系的一封电子邮件，该电子邮件为突然签证撤销提供了紧急计划。该备忘录包括一份建议，以列出移民律师的联系清单，以及保存计划的数字和印刷副本的通知。该电子邮件甚至附带了确保临时住房的指导，这意味着学生需要备份计划。寻求澄清，学生被告知他们负责承担任何费用。
“We’re students; we don’t have lawyers,” she said. “We just don’t know how to navigate this.”
她说：“我们是学生；我们没有律师。”“我们只是不知道如何导航。”
The administration’s actions had led to rising defensiveness and pessimism in her circle. And the housing advice prompted her to ask, half-jokingly, “Are we at war, or what?”
政府的行动导致了她圈子中的防守和悲观情绪的上升。住房建议促使她开玩笑地问：“我们在战争还是什么？”
I spoke with five Chinese nationals for this article: an undergraduate, a master’s student, two people pursuing Ph.D.s, and one newly tenured faculty member. None of them wanted their name used. The younger students—less tethered to the United States—spoke openly about considering other options: countries with clearer rules, less visa ambiguity and angst. The doctoral students were more invested in trying to stay and, despite growing uncertainty, wanted to build a career in the United States. I have been writing about China, from Beijing, for the past few years, so I’m used to my sources asking for anonymity. People in China are acutely conscious of the limits of permissible speech there and how crossing those lines can affect their future. But this time, I wasn’t speaking with Chinese people in China; I was speaking with Chinese people in the United States. This time, they weren’t afraid of their own government back home, but the American one they were living under.
我与五个中国国民进行了这篇文章的交谈：一名本科生，一名硕士学生，两个攻读博士学位的人和一名新任终身教师。他们都不想要使用他们的名字。年轻的学生（不连接到美国）公开地说明了其他选择：规则清晰，签证模棱两可和焦虑的国家。博士生在试图留下的方面投入了更多的投资，尽管不确定性越来越大，但还是想在美国建立职业。在过去的几年中，我一直在写关于中国，北京的文章，所以我习惯了来源要求匿名。中国的人们敏锐地意识到那里允许的讲话的局限性，以及越过这些线条如何影响他们的未来。但是这次，我不是在中国与中国人交谈。我在美国与中国人交谈。这次，他们不怕自己的政府回到家，而是他们居住的美国政府。
The grounds for their fear were not hypothetical. The United States is trying to draw a red line to keep out Chinese students it perceives as a national-security threat. The problem is that no one knows exactly where the line is.
他们恐惧的理由不是假设的。美国正试图绘制一条红线，以防止其认为是国家安全威胁的中国学生。问题在于，没有人确切知道这条线在哪里。
From 2009 to 2022, Chinese students were the largest group of international students in the United States. At peak, in the 2019–20 academic year, some 370,000 Chinese students were enrolled at American universities. Numbers have since tapered off, initially because of the pandemic. Then, on May 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. would begin “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese students, including those studying in “sensitive” fields or with Chinese Communist Party links.
从2009年到2022年，中国学生是美国最大的国际学生。在2019-20学年的高峰期，美国大学约有370,000名中国学生入学。此后数字逐渐减弱，最初是由于大流行。然后，5月28日，国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）宣布，美国将“积极地”撤销中国学生的签证，包括在“敏感”领域或中国共产党链接中学习的学生。
A Republican-backed bill currently in Congress goes further still—it would ban visas for all Chinese nationals looking to study in the United States. The authors of the bill point to China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires citizens to support intelligence-gathering for their home country even when abroad. Although the GOP bill may not pass, its hard-line stance underlines the level of uncertainty students now face.
目前，国会中有一项共和党支持的法案仍在进一步，它将禁止所有希望在美国学习的中国国民签证。该法案的作者指出了中国2017年的国家情报法，该法要求公民即使在国外也要支持自己的祖国情报收集。尽管共和党法案可能无法通过，但其硬线立场强调了学生现在面临的不确定性水平。
In June, President Donald Trump appeared to give Chinese students in the U.S. a reprieve when he announced that they would remain welcome, pending a putative trade deal with China. But by making plain that the students were a token in his trade war, Trump only increased the uncertainty of their predicament.
6月，唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）总统在与中国达成推定的贸易协定之前，他宣布将继续受到欢迎，在美国宣布将受到欢迎。但是，通过明确表明学生在贸易战中是一个象征，特朗普只会增加自己的困境的不确定性。
The Chinese students I spoke with were intently parsing official edicts in an effort to work out which course subjects were sensitive and which weren’t. What I detected from my conversations with them was their sense of being caught in a guessing game. A formerly innocuous decision about whether to leave the U.S. for a trip now seemed like a high-stakes gamble. In the country that they had believed offered the freest and most resource-rich research environment, they were now carefully policing their own discourse. Back in China, students know the score, but they never expected to be contending with these worries in the United States. In its nationalist rhetoric and sweeping use of state-security justifications, the U.S. was starting to mirror aspects of the very system it has long denounced.
我与之交谈的中国学生专心解析官方法令，以努力弄清楚哪些课程学科是敏感的，哪些不是。我从与他们的对话中发现的是他们被猜测的游戏陷入困境。以前关于是否离开美国去旅行的无害决定似乎是一场高风险的赌博。在他们认为提供最自由，最丰富的研究环境的国家，他们现在正在仔细维持自己的论述。回到中国，学生知道得分，但他们从未想到会与美国的这些担忧争夺。在其民族主义的言论和对国家安全辩护的全面使用中，美国开始反映出长期以来一直谴责的系统的各个方面。
“The White House website looks like a Chinese government site now,” the newly tenured professor told me, referring to the oversize portraits of President Trump.
新任终身教授告诉我，“白宫网站现在看起来像中国政府的网站，”指的是特朗普总统的超大肖像。
Read: The Trojan Horse will come for us too
阅读：特洛伊木马也会为我们来
When the social-sciences Ph.D. student first applied to study abroad, she regarded the U.S. as the world leader for research in her field. Among her peers, the opportunity to pursue postgraduate studies at an American university was the runaway first choice. She had graduated from China’s elite Tsinghua University, known especially for its STEM programs, so America’s close ties between research and business, with proximity to venture capital, were part of the draw. “You want to see your work realized in real life,” she told me.
当社会科学博士学位学生首先申请出国留学，她将美国视为其领域研究的世界领导者。在她的同龄人中，在美国大学攻读研究生学习的机会是失控的第一选择。她毕业于中国的精英Tsinghua大学，尤其是以其STEM计划而闻名，因此美国研究与商业之间的紧密联系，靠近风险投资，是抽奖的一部分。她告诉我：“您希望看到自己的工作在现实生活中实现。”
That optimism has faded as she’s seen the heightened U.S.-China tensions filtering down into life on an American campus. “You always walk with your Chinese identity,” she said. “It’s hard to isolate yourself from ongoing chaos.”
当她看到美国 - 中国紧张局势加剧到美国校园的生活中，这种乐观情绪消失了。她说：“你总是以中国身份走路。”“很难隔离自己的混乱。”
Even during the first Trump administration, some of her friends from China had sensed that the environment in the U.S. was growing more hostile. Those who were studying subjects with potential military applications, such as robotics and information systems, applied to European programs instead. But they faced difficulties there too: After initially receiving offers from universities in the European Union, they saw their visa prospects vanish into a bureaucratic thicket of vetting checks. European countries have also increased their scrutiny of Chinese students who conduct STEM research with potential military, as well as civilian, applications.
即使在第一个特朗普政府期间，她的一些来自中国的朋友也感觉到美国的环境越来越敌对。那些正在研究具有潜在军事应用的受试者，例如机器人技术和信息系统，而是适用于欧洲计划。但是他们在那里也面临困难：在最初收到欧盟大学的报价之后，他们看到签证的前景消失在官僚主义的审查室中。欧洲国家还增加了对中国学生的审查，这些中国学生通过潜在的军事以及平民的应用进行STEM研究。
A Chinese student at New York University told me that he’d considered joining a “No Kings” rally this month but decided to stay away, fearing that he might endanger his visa. “It’s becoming the same as the situation in China,” he said. “You can talk about foreign policy, but not domestic policy.”
纽约大学的一名中国学生告诉我，他本月考虑参加“无国王”集会，但决定远离，担心他可能会危害他的签证。他说：“这与中国的情况相同。”“您可以谈论外交政策，而不是国内政策。”
After his positive experience of a year at a U.S. high school, he’d had no hesitation about applying only to American universities—which ranked highly for the engineering degree he expected to graduate with. But he told me he might have applied elsewhere if he had known how quickly American government policy would turn against international students, and Chinese students in particular. Now he was living with the same visa-status anxiety facing friends of his—Chinese nationals or people raised in China—who were seeing their renewals denied or delayed with vague demands for additional paperwork. He wasn’t privy to their full applications, but he believed that these obstacles were a result of their Chinese ties.
在他在美国高中获得一年的积极经验之后，他毫不犹豫地只申请美国大学，这在他期望毕业的工程学位上排名很高。但是他告诉我，如果他知道美国政府政策会违反国际学生，尤其是中国学生，他可能会在其他地方申请。现在，他与同样的签证状态焦虑症生活，面对他的朋友（在中国的国民或在中国长大的人）中生活，他们看到他们的续签被拒绝或延迟了对额外文书工作的模糊要求。他并不愿意全力以赴，但他认为这些障碍是他们中国关系的结果。
The NYU student wasn’t alone in sensing a shift. A master’s student told me that during her reentry to the U.S. last year, she was pulled aside into what Chinese students colloquially call the “little black room,” an immigration-interview room at the airport. This reflects a pattern of heightened scrutiny at the border that began under the Biden administration, but Chinese citizens are familiar with the “little black room” because it’s what security officers back home use if they suspect some kind of anti-government conduct.
纽约大学的学生并不孤单地感知转变。一位硕士学生告诉我，去年她重新进入美国期间，她被拉到了中国学生称为“小黑人房间”的中国学生，这是机场的移民式访问室。这反映了拜登政府始于边界的高度审查模式，但中国公民熟悉“小黑房间”，因为如果他们怀疑某种反政府的行为，那就是安全人员回到家的使用。
The U.S. immigration officer checking her passport said she could leave after the student declared she was studying graphic design. If her answer had been computer science, she believed from accounts she’d seen on social media, “I’d definitely stay there for a few hours.”
美国移民官员检查她的护照官员说，她可以在学生宣布学习图形设计后离开。如果她的回答是计算机科学，她从社交媒体上看到的帐户相信：“我肯定会在那里呆了几个小时。”
A Ph.D. student in a Republican state who has planned a research trip out of the country this summer told me that her adviser expressly warned her not to get involved in protests or post anything pro-Palestine online, and to watch her driving speed. She said these warnings began last year, as red states anticipated Trump’s return to power. Fearing that she could be denied reentry, she was ready to cancel her trip entirely if official U.S. announcements became more hard-line.
博士共和党州的学生今年夏天计划在该国进行研究之旅，告诉我，她的顾问明确警告她不要参与抗议活动或在线发布任何亲帕勒斯坦，并观看她的驾驶速度。她说，这些警告始于去年，因为红色国家预计特朗普将重返权力。担心她会被拒绝再入，如果美国官方宣布变得更加艰苦，她准备完全取消旅行。
The master’s student has exercised similar precautions. Knowing that social-media accounts are checked and have a bearing on visa issuance, she restricts herself to sharing internet memes that broadly hint at her frustration without specifically criticizing federal immigration policy. Memes live in a “gray area,” she said. Being vague makes them “safer.”
硕士的学生也采取了类似的预防措施。知道社交媒体帐户已被检查并与签发签发有关，她限制了自己分享互联网模因，这些模因广泛暗示了她的挫败感，而没有特别批评联邦移民政策。她说，模因生活在“灰色区域”。模糊会使他们“更安全”。
Read: No more student visas? No problem.
阅读：没有更多的学生签证？没问题。
This moment is by no means the first time that the U.S. has viewed Chinese students with suspicion. In the 1950s, American officials placed the scientist Qian Xuesen under house arrest and eventually deported him. The U.S. authorities came to regret their action: Back in China, Qian became the father of its missile-and-space program.
这一刻绝不是美国第一次看到中国学生怀疑。在1950年代，美国官员将科学家Qian Xuesen置于众议院逮捕之下，并最终驱逐出他。美国当局对他们的行动感到遗憾：回到中国，Qian成为其导弹和空间计划的父亲。
Relations began to thaw in the ’70s after President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. In 1979, China’s leader Deng Xiaoping met with President Jimmy Carter and agreed to step up scientific exchanges. Implicit in the U.S. government’s motivation was a belief that if Chinese students were exposed to the benefits of democracy, they would recognize what they were missing and create a political constituency for reforming China.
理查德·尼克松（Richard Nixon）对中国的历史性访问后，关系在70年代开始解冻。1979年，中国领导人邓小平会见了吉米·卡特（Jimmy Carter）总统，并同意加强科学交流。在美国政府的动机中，隐含的是一种信念，即如果中国学生接触民主的利益，他们将认识到他们所缺少的东西，并为改革中国创造政治选区。
This spirit of engagement persisted through China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. By then, the aspiration of studying abroad had been normalized for Chinese young people—as a personal choice. The wildly popular 1990s TV show A Beijinger in New York, which aired on the state broadcaster China Central Television, was a testament to that generation’s curiosity about the outside world. This cultural trend continued into the early 2000s, when “Harvard Girl” Liu Yiting became a national sensation as an American-educated success story. Her parents’ best-selling book chronicling how they’d raised her was a model for millions of other Chinese families, all hoping to nurture their own Harvard Girl.
这种参与精神一直存在着中国于2001年进入世界贸易组织的进入。那时，在国外学习的愿望已成为中国年轻人的正常现象，这是个人选择。在纽约播出的纽约北京一场北京的一部广受欢迎的电视节目在国家广播公司中央电视台上播出，证明了这一代人对外界的好奇心。这种文化趋势一直持续到2000年代初，当时“哈佛姑娘”刘伊廷（Liu Yiting）成为美国教育的成功故事的一种民族轰动。她的父母最畅销的书记录了他们如何抚养她的方式，是其他数百万中国家庭的典范，他们都希望培养自己的哈佛女孩。
The recently U.S.-tenured professor I spoke with came of age during China’s relatively liberal era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the premierships of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, so he had earned his master’s at a very different time in U.S. politics, during Barack Obama’s presidency. His own research field is national security—and he acknowledged that the United States had legitimate concerns about Chinese government–sponsored actions, citing instances of intellectual-property theft.
我最近在1990年代末和2000年代初相对自由的时代，在江安·泽明（Jiang Zemin）和胡金托（Hu Jintao）的英超期间，我与我交谈的是年龄，因此他在巴拉克·奥巴马（Barack Obama）期间在美国政治中赢得了师父的奖金。他自己的研究领域是国家安全，他承认美国对中国政府赞助的行动有正当的担忧，理由是智力 - 普罗沃盗窃案。
“I just don’t think the administration is dealing with this in a targeted way,” he told me. Refusing students a visa simply because of links to the CCP was too broad, he argued, given China’s condition as a one-party state in which almost every institution has a formal party presence. He supported the vetting of students, based on solid evidence and with due process.
他告诉我：“我只是不认为政府以目标方式处理这一问题。”他认为，仅仅因为与CCP的联系而拒绝签证，鉴于中国是一个单党国家的状况，几乎每个机构都有正式的党派存在，因此他认为这太广泛了。他根据可靠的证据和正当程序来支持学生的审查。
In the student-deportation cases he was following, some were being removed because they had once been charged with a minor offense, even if the charge had subsequently been dismissed. “It’s shocking,” he said. “Their status was revoked overnight.” He said, in most instances, the Chinese students’ universities received no prior notice.
在他遵循的学生居住案件中，有些人因曾经被指控犯有轻微的罪行，即使指控后来被驳回了。他说：“这令人震惊。”“他们的身份在一夜之间被吊销。”他说，在大多数情况下，中国学生的大学没有事先通知。
“My guess is the government has adopted some kind of screening system,” he said, but one that seemed to him crude and unreliable. “There are a lot of false positives.” (I requested comment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, but received no response.)
他说：“我的猜测是政府采用了某种筛查系统。”“有很多误报。”（我要求从移民和海关执法部门及其母公司国土安全部发表评论，但没有收到任何回应。）
This student’s home country, he added, was not making things easier for Chinese students abroad. “The National Intelligence Law is not doing us a favor,” he said: The law includes penalties for obstructing intelligence work, which puts Chinese nationals abroad in a very awkward position. I asked what he’d do if the Chinese government asked him to share information; he said he’d call an American lawyer.
他补充说，这个学生的祖国并没有使国外中国学生更容易。他说：“《国家情报法》并没有为我们带来帮助。”该法律包括妨碍情报工作的处罚，这使国外中国国民处于非常尴尬的位置。我问如果中国政府要求他分享信息，他会怎么做？他说他会打电话给美国律师。
On RedNote, a social-media app popular with Chinese students, posts continue to circulate about deportations over such minor infractions as speeding tickets. Some fear that if they travel abroad, they will be denied reentry to the United States. Chinese students are familiar with surveillance, scrutiny, and expansive definitions of national security. They just didn’t expect all of that from the U.S. government, as well.
在Rednote上，这是一个受到中国学生流行的社交媒体应用程序，帖子继续传播有关驱逐出境的驱逐出境。有人担心，如果他们出国旅行，他们将被拒绝再入美国。中国学生熟悉对国家安全的监视，审查和广泛的定义。他们只是没想到美国政府也没有所有这些。
