#221 Happy Thanksgiving! Loss of Talents; Shutdown Averted; Secret Surveillance Program; +

In This Issue #221

·       Happy Thanksgiving!

·       How America Lost The Heart of China's Top Talent

·       Government Shutdown Averted For Now

·       Secret Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to US Phone Records

·       News and Activities for the Communities

Happy Thanksgiving!

How America Lost The Heart of China's Top Talent

According to the Brookings Institution, there is a perception that Chinese talented youth are itching to flock to American shores.  However, the reality is quite the opposition: Just this year, India has eclipsed China in sending the most international students to the United States.  This is the first time has lost that distinction since 2008.Although Chinese students' enrollment in the United States has rebounded this year, this growth may not reflect the choices of China's top talent.Quality, not quantity, is paramount.

A recent report from Tsinghua University, China's leading institution, reveals the trend for China's top talent: Over the past few years, the number of Tsinghua graduates who chose to study in the U.S. plummeted - from 11% in 2018 to a mere 3% in 2021.  Many attribute this to the pandemic; however, the proportion of Tsinghua graduates studying in the United Kingdom has not declined at all, and the number choosing to study in Singapore has even risen.American higher education has diminished appeal for China's best and brightest.  There is fear and anxiety about what they perceive as "a hostile America" toward China - specifically, the U.S. policies targeting Chinese talent and the broader anti-China rhetoric.  Instead they would rather compete to get into the graduate program at Tsinghua or other top Chinese institutions. This sentiment marks a significant change from the 1980s and 1990s.  The geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China are chilling Chinese students' passion for American education.  Trump administration-era policies have been continued by the Biden administration.In other words, souring US-China relations, rising anti-China sentiments, and the concurrent, dramatic increase in anti-Asian hate crimes have inadvertently helped alleviate China's brain drain.The other reason for top students staying in China is the ascendancy of Chinese universities.

Some opinion leaders in the U.S. so not fully grasp how American science and technology education and innovation depend on foreign talent, of which Chinese talent is among the largest.  They consider Chinese students as threats to U.S. national security based on their incorrect assumptions.Whether the U.S. has permanently lost its charm with regard to China's top talent remains unknown.  Whole concerns over intellectual theft are valid, any policy or discourse that weaponizes this concern, and targets groups based on their race, ethnicity, or national origin is fundamentally against American values and interests.Read the Brookings Institution opinion: https://bit.ly/40Jwsus

The South China Morning Post reported that only 211 Americans studied in mainland China during the 2021-22 school year, according to the 2023 version of an annual US government-funded study by the Institute of International Education (IIE). In contrast, from 2018 to 2019, there were more than 11,000 American students in the mainland.The same study showed that during the 2022 to 2023 school year, 289,526 Chinese studied in the US, a slight decrease from the 290,086 during the previous school year.  Enrolment from India, the second-largest source of foreign students in the US, reached an all-time high of 268,923 in the 2022-23 academic year, an increase of 35 per cent over the previous year.According to the Chinese embassy in Washington, during the past two-plus years, at least 70 Chinese students with legal visas were “interrogated, harassed and deported” by US law enforcement at their port of entry.The State Department issued about 91,000 visas this year to Chinese students, according to Brenda Grewe of the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.  Marianne Craven, also of the State Department, said Chinese students were a “priority and valued by US universities”, noting that China is a key country for colleges’ recruitment efforts.  U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said getting people-to-people interactions back on track was a “major priority” for him.

Continuing a trend from the previous academic year, the number of Chinese pursuing undergraduate studies decreased during 2022-23, to 100,349 – a decrease of 8.4 per cent.   Like last year, Chinese graduate students saw a single-digit percentage increase. From 2022-23, the number of graduate students rose by 2.3 per cent to 126,028, accounting for the plurality of the Chinese student population in the US at 43.5 per cent.  And like last year, about half of the Chinese students studied maths, computer science, engineering and other “STEM” subjects.Read the South China Morning Post report: https://bit.ly/3QOdMW0

Government Shutdown Averted For Now

According to multiple media reports including CNN, President Joe Biden signed on November 16 the stopgap spending bill into law, averting a shutdown for now and setting up a contentious fight over funding in the new year.  The plan is not a full-year spending bill and only extends funding until January 19 for priorities including military construction, veterans’ affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department. The rest of the government – anything not covered by the first step – will be funded until February 2.Read the CNN report: https://cnn.it/3G7JsRm  

Secret Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to US Phone Records

According to WIRED, a secretive government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

US senator Ron Wyden wrote a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ), challenging the program’s legality.  A surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services, or DAS, has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people unsuspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact with as well. The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country,First disclosed by the New York Times in September 2013 as Hemisphere, the DAS program—renamed in 2013—has since largely flown under the radar.  Internal records obtained by the newspaper at the time concerning the program’s secrecy show that law enforcement had long been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a variety of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time. Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018.

Earlier this month, Wyden and other lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced comprehensive privacy legislation known as the Government Surveillance Reform Act. The bill contains numerous provisions that, if enacted, would patch most if not all of these loopholes, effectively rendering the DAS program, in its current form, explicitly illegal.Read the WIRED report: https://bit.ly/46xYGtG

News and Activities for the Communities

1.  APA Justice Community Calendar

Upcoming Events:2023/11/26 Rep. Gene Wu's Weekly town hall meeting2023/12/03 Rep. Gene Wu's Weekly town hall meeting2023/12/04 APA Justice monthly meeting 2023/12/10 Rep. Gene Wu's Weekly town hall meeting2023/12/12 Community Briefing on Section 7022023/12/13 1882 Foundation - Repeal of Chinese Exclusion and Wang Kim Ark2023/12/17 Rep. Gene Wu's Weekly town hall meetingVisit https://bit.ly/45KGyga for event details.

2.  Cosmos Club Luncheon Event on US-China Science and Technology Relations

On November 16, 2023, the Cosmos Club hosted an in-person luncheon event on "Challenges and Opportunities: Defining US-China Science and Technology Relations."  The featured speakers were Rebecca Spyke Keiser, chief of research security strategy and policy at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Tobin (Toby) Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities (AAU).  They were engaged in an interactive discussion on the complex relationship between the US and China and its bearings on a plethora of science policy issues.