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President Donald Trump on a visit to Beijing said he wants Chinese students to study in the United States, acknowledging he was disagreeing with some of his right-wing base.
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Chinese student numbers have declined in the United States due to factors including perceived hostility in Trump's America but also due to economic constraints inside the Asian power and the rise of China's own universities.
"It's a very insulting thing to tell a country we don't want your people in our schools," Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview from Beijing broadcast late Thursday in the United States.
Trump said that lower-tier universities in the United States would be hit hardest if Chinese students did not come.
"They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China," Trump said, amid growing global recognition of Chinese universities, especially in science and technology.
Trump rose to political prominence with harsh rhetoric against non-white immigrants and for years he berated China, accusing it of cheating its way to economic might.
Asked by the conservative host if Chinese students were involved in nefarious activities, Trump said, "Honestly, you know, they do things to us and we do things to them."
"Not everybody agrees with me, and it doesn't sound like a very conservative position," he said of his support of Chinese students.
"I'm really a common sense guy, I think, more than a conservative guy."
Trump last year also said he wanted to boost Chinese student numbers, contradicting his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who publicly had vowed to "aggressively" revoke visas for Chinese students.
The Trump administration has taken other actions that have discouraged students, including a temporary suspension of visas as it stepped up scrutiny of applicants' social media postings.
Rubio has boasted of stripping visas to international students involved in protests against Israel.
More than 265,000 Chinese students were studying in the United States in the last academic year, with India now surpassing China as the top source of international students, according to a State Department-backed study.
International students are more likely to pay full tuition, providing a major lifeline for US universities.
Vice President JD Vance before taking office had called on conservatives to find ways to weaken US universities, seeing them as hotbeds of support for the left.
AFP
