Citing concerns over potential espionage, a United States congressional committee sent a letter to the University of Maryland, College Park, last week requesting extensive details on Chinese national students.

The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent letters to six universities last week, including Stanford, Purdue and Carnegie Mellon, demanding a plethora of information on their Chinese students by April 1. This comes on the heels of dozens of other investigations into colleges and universities by the Trump administration, reflecting its mistrust in institutions of higher education.

The Republican-led committee requested the following information in a letter signed by committee Chairman John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan:

1. A list of all universities that Chinese national students at UMD previously attended, along with their research affiliations.
2. The sources of tuition funding for the students, including “personal wealth scholarships,” Chinese talent recruitment programs and Chinese government grants.
3. The type of research Chinese national students conduct and the programs they participate in at UMD.
4. All UMD programs that include Chinese national participants, along with the sources of funding for the programs.
5. A list of laboratories and research initiatives where Chinese national students currently work.
6. A country-by-country breakdown of applications, admittances and enrollments at UMD.

“Our nation’s universities, long regarded as the global standard for excellence and innovation, are increasingly used as conduits for foreign adversaries to illegally gain access to critical research and advanced technology,” Moolenaar wrote, calling America’s student visa system a “Trojan horse” for Beijing.

The committee is also asking that university President Darryll Pines provide the answers to a number of questions, including the percentage of UMD’s graduate student body made up of Chinese citizens, the percentage of Chinese graduate students engaged in federally funded research, and what background screening processes Chinese nationals go through to apply to sensitive research programs.

In a statement to The Baltimore Banner, Hafsa Siddiqi, manager of media relations at UMD wrote that “the University of Maryland is working on a response in accordance with federal privacy laws.”

The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, also known as FERPA, affords students, once they are in college, the right to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information from educational records. It’s unclear if the information requested by the congressional committee would personally identify students.

Yuxiang Lai, a graduate student at UMD, said he was “disappointed but not surprised” to read the congressional letter.

Lai, who is now an American citizen, was born in China and moved to the United States when he was 11 years old. His mother’s job as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago was the reason the family moved.

“I’m fearful for not just our Chinese international students, but also all international student and immigrant students as well,” he said. “These communities do very important work for the United States and for the world in terms of advancing science.”

The letter sent to UMD calls college campuses “soft targets for espionage.” The U.S. Department of Justice has raised concerns, according to the letter, that “international students’ motives aren’t just to learn but to share that intelligence with foreign superpowers to see a competitive advantage.”

About 300,000 students from China study in the United States, according to a Harvard University study cited by the congressional committee. Since 2015, American universities have hosted more students from China than any other country.

Educating Chinese-born students hasn’t always been a controversial thing, said Madeline Hsu, an American historian known for her scholarship in Chinese-American history at UMD. Chinese students have been traveling to the United States to study at colleges and universities since the 1870s. The Chinese Educational Mission, which consisted of about 120 students, was the first documented case of citizens from other countries traveling to the United States to learn.

“International education was actually seen as a way of trying to forge strong international relationships,” Hsu said. “The State Department had previously taken up these kinds of cultural exchanges as diplomacy.”

But that’s no longer the case.

“The large influx of Chinese national students into the United States presents a growing national security challenge,” Moolenaar wrote in the letter.

He wrote that the Chinese Community Part has “established a well-documented, systematic pipeline to embed researchers in U.S. institutions.”

Rising tensions in the United States means that more Chinese students will go to other countries, like Canada, Australia and those in Europe, to study, and schools like UMD will miss out, said Hsu.

“The United States will basically be losing out on some of the brightest science and technological talent,” she said. “It’s actually a real coup for the United States to be able to recruit these students and bring them into their graduate and research programs, because it contributes to the United States’ remaining competitive interest of technological research and remaining on the cutting edge.“

Lai, the graduate student, said he thinks UMD would suffer a great loss without Chinese graduate students.

“We contribute a large amount of our time, resources and knowledge to these higher education institutions, which wouldn’t be where they are today without us,” he said. “I wish that universities would do more to protect these communities.”

Students and faculty members have circulated a petition calling on UMD leadership to refuse to provide any information pertaining to Chinese faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. The petition has over 500 signatures, according to organizers.

In an emailed response to the petition, UMD President Pines wrote to the students that university leaders “will do our very best to be responsive to the federal inquiry while upholding the university’s policies and procedures, as well as our commitment to First Amendment rights and academic freedom.”

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