Note. Against credulously naïve China hawkishness [0006]
This is very good (modulo gratuitous capitalisation).
Reference. New Analysis reveals Chinese Nationals now outnumber British Students in key STEM Postgraduate Courses at Britain's Top Universities [ut2026]
‘There are now more Chinese nationals than British nationals studying physics, engineering, chemistry, mathematics or computer science at a postgraduate level at Britain’s top five universities for those subjects. In engineering, there are roughly twice as many Chinese nationals as British at that elite level.’
This is not.
Reference. Why is Britain educating China’s scientists? [samuel2026]
Michael Jinghan Zeng’s fairly good FT Chinese piece, translated Yuxuan Jia at Pekingnology, expounds most of Samuel’s article’s problems fairly accurately. I propose to make these points more explicitly.
Reference. When The Times asked ‘Why is Britain educating China’s scientists?’, what did they really overlook? [zeng2026]
I make the following painfully dull assumptions (each of which should be read ceteris paribus for a reasonable range of starting values).
- It is not good for China to become military stronger.
- It is good for China to become more liberal and democratic.
- It is good for the British economy to grow.
- The more closely those involved identify with Britain (e.g. via naturalisation, politically and culturally), the better.
- It is better to achieve the foregoing more cheaply.
Samuel probably holds these (in my view correct) views for reasons I’d consider to be some combination of unenlightened and unsophisticated. Since I am lazy and cowardly, I shall only gesture at my obviously sounder reasoning, and decline for the moment to elaborate; but by way of explanation rather than justification, I permit myself to remark that I am a mostly deracinated évolué whose parents and grandparents did much of the évolution (see aside below); I preëmptively disclaim any responsibility for attendant misinterpretations.
Any sensible question to ask is of the form: what is the marginal effect of cutting the number of student visas available to PRC nationals—
- by some given proportion , and
- holding fixed other parameters (concerning policy, the macroeconomic situation, etc.)?
For instance, given current policy in all other areas and some plausible medium-term economic forecast, what is the marginal effect of cutting the number of visas by one?
I have posed the question thus because Samuel does not particularly clearly distinguish the following two claims.
- There are too few British STEM students.
- There are too many students who are PRC nationals.
Obviously one can consistently hold both views. It seems Samuel takes each to partially strengthen the case for the other. This is obviously wrong. Zeng hints at the problem: ‘If the number of Chinese students were to decrease, it would not be the “Chinese places” that shrink first, but rather the overall size of the disciplines and the research capacity.’ To put it more explicitly: there is no overall fixed total number of students; there is no guarantee that when we throw out a Chinese trinmo, a Briton will replace them. It is equally possible that 0.1 British trinmos replace them and 0.9 places disappear, or some other combination thereof.
Zeng’s point is pretty simple: the presence of intelligent PRC nationals (both students and researchers) generally increases the attractiveness of Britain’s universities, and so usually works to the advantage of British students. That is to say, making the same assumptions above—
- It is not good for China to become military stronger.
- It is good for China to become more liberal and democratic.
- It is good for the British economy to grow.
- The more closely those involved identify with Britain (e.g. via naturalisation, politically and culturally), the better.
- It is better to achieve the foregoing more cheaply.
—decreasing the number of student visas available to PRC nationals would, with respect to 3 (growing the British economy) probably be a bad idea. Nor would it free up funds to encourage the study by young Britons of technically important subjects, because they financially contribute to the system. So this is not very useful.
What about the other points? I don’t think that British universities should conduct joint research with Chinese universities that seems more likely to be of military use to them than to us, for instance. And § 3 of the UKCT article mentions one such example. However, it also notes that it is possible to block research collaboration independently of visa policy, and that obviously it would be helpful not to utterly stupidly hobble investigations by e.g. only recording Pinyin names.
Samuel appears only to have read the first part of § 3, rather than its conclusion or § 4. In UKCT’s words: ‘those trying to devise policy approaches to support the public or national interest ought to think more creatively and constructively about how to address the concerns behind the ‘research security’ paradigm without resorting to “securitisation” per se.’ Although it is obvious that foreign students historically have played an important rôle in China’s technological development, it is far from clear that the marginal student at Imperial rather than Tsinghua will really make it any easier to invade Taiwan, given China’s recent development (§ 4).
Samuel blithely overlooks this point: ‘The problem is that hosting thousands of Chinese engineers is very much not the same as getting in bulk batches of Canadians or Germans. The Chinese state has an official policy of “military-civil fusion” whereby all civil technology is put at the disposal of defence and security needs as well as technological espionage and economic coercion.’
Samuel would obviously right to say that, in gross terms, admitting Chinese students will involve training some future military officials who might invade Taiwan in potentially useful skills. But this is the wrong question to ask; the policy question with respect to objectives (1) and (2) is: what difference does it make that they are here as undergraduates rather than in China?
The difference it doesn’t make is that they will be any better at e.g. coming up with stealth materials for fighter jets to invade Taiwan. We (that is, the West), have missed that bus. Samuel’s argument might have made some sense in 1996, but it hardly does now.
It is more instructive to ask why there are Chinese students in Britain in the first place. UKCT: ‘General push and pull factors are likely to remain supreme and include (but are not limited to) job opportunities, public safety, politics, family proximity, and all the other elements of quality of life, doubtless down to weather and food for some’. In other words, civil-military fusion ought to be on our minds in examining e.g. Sino–British research collaboration on militarily sensitive technologies, but is much less relevant in considering the marginal effect of kicking out the generic PRC national Imperial maths student.
Here is a conjecture: they are here because we are still winning in one respect, and one respect only. We are winning because we are still, broadly, democratically governed liberal polities, in which the penalties for (e.g.) speech (of course too high in Britain) are far more impartially and gently administered than in China. We are winning because we are far further away from turning into West Korea. We are winning because the voices of April can whisper in reading groups in the West.
I don’t have any particularly sound argument for this conjecture. Some reasons for hope in this connexion are that:
- informal conversation with mainland Chinese students suggests that the Shanghai lockdown severely radicalised many overseas students against the government;
- overseas dissident activity saw at least a brief uptick afterwards (e.g. at Tiananmen vigils, protests outside the embassy, and so on); and
- at least for a while, there was a meaningful effort to start reading groups and other forms of overseas dissident activism, which I think are now sustainably at a higher level than before.
The marginal effect of reducing the number of visas available to PRC nationals, I therefore conjecture, is something like this.
- It vastly diminishes the opportunity for political exploration that generally leads away from the ruling orthodoxy in China.
- It cuts off a useful source of human capital for own own economies, using which need not (given a sensible understanding of civil-military fusion) meaningfully be to the advantage of Chinese military power.
- At the same time, it cuts off a useful source of human capital for the Chinese state, which does meaningfully erode Chinese military power.
- In the long term, it will diminish the community of people who might indigenise foreign ideologies other than Stalinism in the service of the world’s second-most populous country, and therefore make any prospect of bettering Chinese society when the question of the succession arises dimmer.
One obvious rejoinder is that transnational repression makes overseas dissident activity very difficult. A first point is that this is at most will mitigate rather than reverse the effects of such activity; the Chinese state has no means of making people more loyal abroad than they would be at home. A second point is that, in the worst case scenario, and without a response, the primary victims of transnational repression are mainland students themselves, who are usually better off here than at home. But this is right: it is hard for mainland students to know whom they can trust, and to have open discussions. The measures I have seen to stop such effects will certainly have some effect, but it is unclear how much.
So a more interesting question than the visa question is how host countries can best facilitate political and academic freedom amongst overseas Chinese students; that, at any rate, is my response to UKCT’s invitation to avoid naïve securitisation, with a view to taking China seriously rather than credulously.
‘Zionists were infuriated by his refusal to support Israel unconditionally, religious Jews by his happy confession that the only thing that made him feel Jewish was anti-semitism’ (Johnson, Mendès
).