On the day Trump said the US would welcome more Chinese students, Temple University in Philadelphia announced it was ending its partnership with the China Scholarship Council, the main Chinese government body funding study abroad for Chinese nationals.
On Monday, Temple’s president, John Fry, said that the school would no longer admit students under the programme because of “potential national security concerns” raised by the US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. He did not specify what the concerns were.
In separate letters on July 8, he asked them to “reconsider” their partnerships with the CSC, alleging that it represented a “[Chinese Communist Party]-managed technology transfer effort that exploits US institutions and directly supports China’s military and scientific growth”.
Two days later, Dartmouth College, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Tennessee all announced they were severing ties to their CSC programmes, under which graduate students were co-funded by the universities and the Chinese government.