US media: Britain's restrictions on Chinese students are disadvantageous to itself
2024-08-10
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Source: Cankaoxiaoxi.com
Reference News reported on August 7 On August 1, Bloomberg News published an article titled "Crackdown on Chinese students raises concerns about Britain's technological ambitions," written by Sun Yazhou. The article is excerpted as follows:
Luo, a 23-year-old Chinese man, was delighted when he was accepted into the PhD program in electrical engineering at the University of Cambridge in 2021. Before he could start his studies, he only needed to get approval from a British government agency that reviews whether research topics can be used for military purposes.
Luo told Bloomberg in an interview that he thought it was just a formality because he had been approved when he was studying for a master's degree at the same university. But he was rejected. So he applied again and was rejected again.
The UK review body, the Foreign, Commonwealth Office and Development Department, did not give any reason. Luo said he felt he was caught up in an increasingly fierce "higher education risk reduction" movement in the UK.
The apparent crackdown has already affected students who say they have been unfairly framed as potential spies and exacerbated a funding crisis at universities. The de-risking strategy has also reduced international research collaboration.
The battle for technological supremacy between China and the United States and its allies has further penetrated into higher education, with similar measures being taken in countries such as the United States, Europe and Australia.
Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at Oxford University, said: “Excessive safety regulation in international research collaboration is not only associated with individual cases of discrimination, it also harms western science and innovation.”
When the British government launched the Academic Technology Approval Scheme in 2007, its purpose was to block individuals who might use research in the UK to develop weapons of mass destruction. This was because MI5 had previously warned that the al-Qaeda terrorist network was recruiting university students. In 2020, the program was expanded to include all advanced military technologies, covering subjects such as physics, mathematics, engineering and artificial intelligence.
The expansion of the ATS coincides with escalating economic frictions with China, with the US, UK and its allies imposing a series of trade restrictions on China. Against this backdrop, the ATS rejection rate has increased almost tenfold, according to statistics from the Foreign, Commonwealth Office and Development.
According to interviews with multiple professors at universities across the UK, a sharp rise in rejection rates and a lack of clarity about the criteria for the ATAS scheme have alarmed some supervisors who are trying to fill staffing gaps on their research projects.
“Every process of the ATA program is exhausting. There is no transparency,” said Mingwen Bai, an assistant professor of materials engineering at the University of Leeds, who has not received a decision on the application of a doctoral student he plans to recruit three months later.
“When your students are rejected, you lose a researcher and potentially lose the project and funding,” Bai said. “That’s not good for the talent pipeline.”
The rejection of Chinese students has exacerbated the funding difficulties faced by British universities. In particular, since 2017, the annual tuition fees for domestic students in the UK have been limited to less than 9,250 pounds. According to an analysis by the Russell Group of universities, this is equivalent to a subsidy of about 2,500 pounds per student per year.
In addition to talent and tuition fees, China also provides funding for research, which has also come under increasing international scrutiny. China has provided hundreds of millions of pounds in funding for joint projects with UK Research and Innovation. This cooperation has produced 804 joint projects and 10,490 academic papers.
Russ Shaw, founder of the global tech advocacy group, said if the trend continues it will spell trouble for business. "The freedom of talent facilitates the transfer of knowledge," he said. "We can't do this alone."
William Wu, founder of Liverpool startup ZeroAI, said Chinese students make important financial, intellectual and academic contributions to the UK. He said: "It would be unwise to give up top talent as the UK strives to build trustworthy artificial intelligence." (Compiled by Tu Qi)
