The far-right attack on higher education is sharpening into a full-blown offensive. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently pledged to “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese international students. This was declared days after Donald Trump attempted to strongarm Harvard into banning all international students — a move aimed squarely at Chinese nationals, who make up 20% of the international student body and supply the university with millions in tuition revenue.
This is part of a deliberate campaign rooted in fractures within the U.S. ruling class. One faction sees international students, especially from China, as essential for maintaining U.S. dominance in tech and science. International students make up over half of all U.S. graduate STEM enrollments, with Chinese students numbering around 277,000. In 2022-2023 alone, Chinese students contributed approximately $15 billion to the U.S. economy through tuition, housing, and living costs. Their contributions to the STEM workforce after graduation are substantial and irreplaceable given the decades-long deterioration of primary schooling in the U.S.
As venture capitalist Josh Wolfe remarked in a Politico interview: “America’s share of international students has dropped from 23 percent to 15 percent over two decades. That’s less a statistic and more like strategic surrender.”
This sentiment reflects the anxiety of a large swathe of the corporate capitalist world. So why is Trump willing to toss these profitable ventures aside?
The answer lies in the other faction of the U.S. ruling class. Embodied by Trump, Rubio, and the architects of Project 2025, this counterpart views international students as ideological threats to the nationalist remaking of U.S. institutions. This is a power struggle between rival visions for the empire.
On one side are those elite who seek to maintain globalization: corporate capitalists who still rely on foreign labor to shore up a decaying U.S. education and tech system. On the other is an ascendant nationalist bloc, which aims to weaponize immigration, defund higher education, and impose authoritarian rule. Their strategy? Starve elite liberal universities, crush national dissent, and pivot all military resources toward confronting China.
Neoliberal decline, nationalist reaction
This conflict is rooted in the economic transformations of the last 30 years. In the U.S., neoliberal austerity hollowed out public education, privatized universities, and made higher ed dependent on international student tuition. At the same time, China built a robust, state-backed scientific ecosystem. The result was a steep decline in U.S. soft power, and with it, the ability to attract foreign talent and ideological allies.
A 2023 study captures this trend succinctly: 71% of Chinese students who graduated between 1991 and 2004 stayed in the U.S. That number fell to 30% for graduates between 2004 and 2015. As more graduates return home, the U.S. sees diminishing returns on its investment in skilled labor. China’s rise as an innovative powerhouse has created high-quality education and employment opportunities, reversing the brain drain. While the justification given by U.S. officials is the tired scapegoat of “Chinese espionage,” the reality is that the growing geopolitical tension, and the decreasing return on investment for the U.S., is what’s really at play. China no longer needs to outsource its scientific development, and many Chinese students see little reason to stay in a country that greets them with surveillance, suspicion, and racism.
These economic shifts have changed the calculations of the U.S. ruling class. While the tech industry once depended almost entirely on Chinese STEM talent, it has since adapted to new labor sources and global dynamics. That doesn’t mean that the sector can function without Chinese workers — far from it — but the partial loosening of dependence has opened up political space for the far right to escalate its attacks without facing as much resistance from capital.
These strikes must be placed within the ideological framework underlying the far-right billionaire agenda: a plan to completely restructure higher education, confront the “enemy abroad” (China), and destroy the “enemy from within” (the student-led anti-genocide movement at home). The Trump camp’s crackdown isn’t some irrational outburst. It’s a targeted blow, one tolerated by sectors of capital because it feeds a broader repressive transformation of the state.
Project 2025 and the war on liberal academia
The attack on Chinese students exemplifies how Project 2025’s blueprint is already being put into motion — targeting higher education through visa cuts, research defunding and ideological restructuring.
Harvard is a primary target. As a pillar of the liberal wing of the ruling class, it has occasionally resisted the most extreme directives of the far right — most recently by defying Trump’s demands to crack down on student protestors and decertify pro-Palestine organizations on campus. This was enough to mark it as a symbol and a target. Harvard’s refusal prompted the Trump administration to freeze $3.2 billion in federal grants and contracts to the university, and denying visas to Chinese students is another way to cut off its financial lifeline and make it bend. Chinese students, most of whom pay full tuition, fund core programs and subsidize U.S. students. Gutting that income stream is a pressure tactic, and a warning.
Divide and repress: Targeting the student movement
The crackdown on Chinese students also serves a domestic function. It’s a calculated assault on the student left, designed to impose loyalty and eliminate resistance across campuses. Project Esther, a companion playbook to Project 2025, outlines a repressive campus regime: one in which universities are conscripted to police protests, surveil students, and suppress Palestine solidarity through intimidation and punishment.
This isn’t about security; it’s about political retribution. It’s meant to intimidate future uprisings, blacklist dissenters, and punish elite institutions like Harvard for their perceived softness on suppressing pro-Palestine activism on campus.
A legacy of exclusion, a future of resistance
This moment echoes the 1892 Chinese Exclusion Act, which criminalized Chinese laborers and banned them from citizenship. Today’s visa bans, surveillance programs, and political scapegoating, are its direct descendants. Then as now, exclusion is a tool to uphold racial hierarchy and maintain imperial control in times of global transition.
But the conditions are different now. China is not a dependent colony — it’s a rising global power. And international students are not passive recipients of U.S. benevolence. They are workers, researchers, and organizers embedded in struggles on and off campus.
We cannot afford to treat this as a mere “foreign policy” issue. The war on Chinese students is a war on science, education, and working-class internationalism.
Resist the new Red Scare
This is the terrain the New Cold War is playing out on: not just between nation states, but in classrooms, labs, and student movements. The pressure on institutions like Harvard, the crackdown on Palestine solidarity, and the scapegoating of foreign students are all connected.
A united, multinational working class remains the most powerful line of defense against this repression. Defending Chinese students means defending the space to organize, dissent, and imagine a different kind of university — and a different kind of world.
Feature image: Widener Library at Harvard University. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
