U.S. granted Chinese student visas at pre-pandemic levels in June

For the approximately 370,000 Chinese students attending school in the U.S., the summer of 2020 was marked by a series of towering hurdles:

• The pandemic made travelling between China and the U.S. unusually complicated and expensive, as both countries had in place emergency restrictions.
• The American president was raging about a “plague from China” and doubling down on racist rhetoric, putting ethnically Chinese people on alert for rising hate crimes.
• Trump signed Proclamation 10043 in May, kicking out over 1,000 students with even a vague connection to “military-civil fusion” in China. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempted to put in place a policy to deport any international student without in-person classes, but this move was blocked in court.
• The increasingly hostile atmosphere, some students told The China Project, was making them reconsider their future studies in the U.S.

Are student numbers rebounding now?

The summer of 2021 is looking very different, at least according to one key statistic, reported by the South China Morning Post:

Official data from the U.S. State Department shows that the U.S. began to increase its visa approvals for Chinese students in earnest in May, with its latest numbers of F1 visas – the most common type of student visa – reaching similar levels for those granted before the COVID-19 outbreak in late 2019.

The number of F1 visas granted for Chinese students in the month of June for the past three years are:

• June 2019: 34,001
• June 2020: 8
• June 2021: 33,896

“One month doesn’t tell the whole story — it’ll still be awhile before we know if overall numbers will rebound — but a good early sign,” remarked Eric Fish, a journalist who has written extensively about Chinese students in the U.S.

• Fish thinks the numbers still might dip in the fall, but are likely to keep growing in the longer term because “the pool of those who can afford U.S. education in China is…still growing.”

Will Beijing be happy?

While a resumption of pre-pandemic levels of student visas is something Beijing is sure to welcome, other student-related grievances from China remain unaddressed.

• Proclamation 10043 remains in effect, and the Biden Administration has defended it as “narrowly targeted,” even as activists have raised $125,000 to issue a class-action lawsuit against it.
• Other U.S. “wrongdoings,” according to the Chinese foreign ministry, include “visa restrictions on members of the Communist Party of China and their family members,” “harassing [of] Chinese students overseas,” and some individual student visa rejection cases.