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President Donald Trump appears to have walked back plans for the U.S. State Department to scrutinize and revoke visas for Chinese students studying in the country. On June 11, 2025, Trump posted on his social media platform TruthSocial that visas for Chinese students would continue and that they are welcome in the United States, as their presence has always been good with me! The announcement came weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that his department would begin scrutinizing and revoking student visas for Chinese nationals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, or whose studies are in critical fields. The contradictory moves have led to confusion among Chinese students attending college or considering studying in the United States. Over time, Chinese nationals have faced barriers to studying in the U.S. As a scholar who studies relations between the two nations, I argue that efforts to ban Chinese students in the United States are not unprecedented, and historically they have come with consequences. Student visas under fire Since the late 1970s, millions of Chinese students have been granted visas to study at American universities. That total includes approximately 277,000 who studied in the United States in the 20232024 academic year. It is difficult to determine how many of these students would have been affected by a ban on visas for individuals with Chinese Community Party affiliations or in critical fields. Approximately 40% of all new members of the Chinese Communist Party each year are drawn from Chinas student population. And many universities in China have party connections or charters that emphasize party loyalty. The critical fields at risk were not defined. A majority of Chinese students in the U.S. are enrolled in math, technology, science, and engineering fields. A long history Yung Wing became the first Chinese student to graduate from a U.S. university in 1852. Since then, millions of Chinese students have come to the United States to study, supported by programs such as the Chinese Educational Mission, Boxer Indemnity Fund scholarships, and the Fulbright Program. The Institute for International Education in New York estimated the economic impact of Chinese students in the U.S. at over US$14 billion a year. Chinese students tend to pay full tuition to their universities. At the graduate level, they perform vital roles in labs and classrooms. Just under half of all Chinese students attending college in the U.S. are graduate students. However, there is a long history of equating Chinese migrants as invaders, spies or risks to national security. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the U.S. Department of Justice began to prevent Chinese scholars and students in STEM fieldsscience, technology, engineering, and mathfrom returning to China by stopping them at U.S. ports of entry and exit. They could be pulled aside when trying to board a flight or ship and their tickets canceled. In one infamous case, Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesen was arrested, harassed, ordered deported, and prevented from leaving over five years from 1950 to 1955. In 1955, the United States and China began ambassadorial-level talks to negotiate repatriations from either country. After his experience, Qian became a much-lauded supporter of the Communist government and played an important role in the development of Chinese transcontinental missile technology. During the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice raided Chinatown organizations looking for Chinese migrants who arrived under false names during the Chinese Exclusion Era, a period from the 1880s to 1940s when the U.S. government placed tight restrictions on Chinese immigration into the country. A primary justification for the tactics was fear that the Chinese in the U.S. would spy for their home country. Between 1949 and 1979, the U.S and China did not have normal diplomatic relations. The two nations recognized each other and exchanged ambassadors starting in January 1979. In the more than four decades since, the number of Chinese students in the U.S. has increased dramatically. Anti-Chinese discrimination The idea of an outright ban on Chinese student visas has raised concerns about increased targeting of Chinese in the U.S. for harassment. In 1999, Taiwanese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested on suspicion of using his position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to spy for China. Lee remained imprisoned in solitary confinement for 278 days before he was released without a conviction. In 2018, during the first Trump administration, the Department of Justice launched its China Initiative. In its effort to weed out industrial, technological, and corporate espionage, the initiative targeted many ethnic Chinese researchers and had a chilling effect on continued exchanges, but it secured no convictions for wrongdoing. rump again expressed concerns last year that undocumented migrants from China might be coming to the United States to spy or build an army. The repeated search for spies among Chinese migrants and residents in the U.S. has created an atmosphere of fear for Chinese American communities. Broader foreign policy context The U.S. plan to revoke visas for students studying in the U.S. and the Chinese response is being formed amid contentious debates over trade. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian accused the U.S. of violating an agreement on tariff reduction the two sides discussed in Geneva in May, citing the visa issues as one example. Trump has also complained that the Chinese violated agreements between the countries, and some reports suggest that the announcement on student visas was a negotiating tactic to change the Chinese stance on the export of rare earth minerals. When Trump announced his trade deal with China on June 11, he added a statement welcoming Chinese students. However, past practice shows that the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion may have already damaged the climate for Chinese international students, and at least some degree of increased scrutiny of student visas will likely continue regardless. Meredith Oyen is an associate professor of history and Asian studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Public servants today face a double burden: Theyre simultaneously charged with running our most important community functionslike disaster preparedness and administering electionswhile the technology at their disposal is outdated and ill-fitted to the job. The rise of AI has upended how private companies operate, but public servants across agencies lack AI tools designed specifically with government work in mind. In a perfect world, public servants could trust mass-market AI. But provisioning critical services requires a high bar. Quickly deploying technology prone to generating inaccuracies is an unacceptable tradeoff for those solving societys hardest problems. Few of us would be happy to get our mail a day earlier if it meant 10% of our mail never came. The tradeoff is more acute when public servants are working to end homelessness or reinvigorating economic development. AI is more accurate and useful for government employees when it’s built atop core data assets like documents and emails and the contextual metadata around those assetsinformation like who shared documents, when they were shared, and the conversations that surrounded them. Public sector AI requires context The massive opportunity to empower public servants and improve government operations with functional, reliable AI tools comes not from training larger, smarter models, but ensuring AI has context. Context is everything because government operations depend upon the local partners, procedures, history, and regulations of a community of practitioners. For AI to work for public servants, it must understand the context well enough to generate accurate information. Todays AI tools fall short because they lack contextual metadata. Without this information, AI is not fit for purpose. Public servants cannot sacrifice accuracy for speed. Siloed technology destroys context Government work is inherently collaborative. Cybersecurity officials work with state and federal counterparts, and homelessness coordinators work with public health departments. But there is a fundamental mismatch between the collaborative nature of government work and the silos of most technology. Todays AI tools generally serve single organizations, lacking functionality to enable cross-agency collaboration. When FEMA responds to disasters, utilities, hospitals, shelters, and community organizations all play key roles. Public servants coordinate these nongovernment partners, but isolated AI systems can only access information within their own agenciesmissing the context that lives across organizations. And the work doesn’t happen in siloed agency folders. It happens in email threads, texts, unshared working documents, and view-only, versioned, and immediately outdated shared documents. These disconnected digital workspaces destroy context. But this is a technology problemwhat does a context-rich technology look like? The government operations tech stack Effective government AI must be attentive to the different technology layers that underpin the work of public servants. We can visualize the government operations tech stack in four layers: Layer 1: SystemsThe first, foundational, layer comprises the file storage systems: OneDrive, SharePoint, local folders, Outlook, and other repositories. While this is where key information often lives, it is rarely well-organized or accessible to outside partners. Layer 2: ResourcesThis refers to the resources themselves. Think individual files like memos, spreadsheets, SOPs, and more. While enterprise AI systems can access one organizations documents, they miss the critical context of how and why these resources were shared, who created them, and what discussions they generated. Layer 3: Coordination The coordination layer encompasses emails, texts, events, direct messages, and video communications. This is where cross-organization collaboration happens and where ongoing discussions shape decisions. It contains the three sentence email from the 30-year department veteran, who succinctly explained where an internal policy originated, why it was created, and which parts no longer apply. This is institutional knowledge shared in real-time. AI tools without access to the coordination layer are set up for failure. Layer 4: InterfaceThe interface layer is where public servants make use of the data across layers. And this is where purpose-built AI can make an impact. Government officials should be able to get immediate answers without needing to recall whether information lives in a shared drive, email, video call, or calendar event. And the interface layer doesnt end with a search it should enable the next step, whether thats drafting a policy, connecting with a subject matter expert, or reaching out to partners. Atop digital layers are public servants making decisions and taking action. This is where policy meets practice, where coordination becomes execution, and where community needs are met. Only context-rich AI can reliably scale public impact An AI interface with the full contextual metadata of government operationsthe systems, resources, and coordination layersbecomes transformative. An elections official searching for polling center volunteers finds not just the sign-up sheet in their drive, but also the follow-up email from a facilities manager identifying the correct entrance, the text from a sick volunteer needing replacement, and the recent listserv discussion correcting the record about the polling location entrance. AI with this context provides a complete operational picture, not isolated documents that become outdated as soon as theyre created. During emergency response, an AI with contextual access can connect FEMA policies with real-time partner communications, community feedback, and operational updates. Instead of just knowing what documents exist, the AI understands who shared critical information, when situations changed, and why certain decisions were made, enabling more effective coordination and faster response times. This contextual AI doesn’t just provide informationit provides traceable, auditable insights that public servants can trust and act upon. It connects users not only to the right documents but to the right people and the right conversations, embedded within their specific community and operational context. The vision is clear: AI that lives where government work happens, with access to the full collaborative environment across organizations. When deployed with complete contextual metadata, AI can empower public servants to make a bigger impact while maintaining the accuracy and accountability needed. Government operations are fundamentally about coordination and context, and AI must reflect this reality to succeed in the public sector. Madeleine Smith is cofounder and CEO of Civic Roundtable.
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E-Commerce
The healthcare industry has many ills. The payer-provider disconnect creates confusion, limits access, and exacerbates inefficiencies. Doctor and nurse burnout has led to widespread staffing shortages. This is compounded by aging infrastructure, outdated regulation, fragmented care delivery, and overly-complicated legacy systems. The list goes on. But there is a particular cancer that we could eliminate tomorrow: big consulting firms. Every year, American healthcare systems spend hundreds of millions of dollars on consulting firms that deliver PDFs instead of solutions. While patients suffer and clinicians burn out, these legacy firms collect their checks and move onleaving implementation challenges to healthcare institutions they’ve diagnosed but failed to treat. Proponents of the Big Five consulting model would argue that sclerotic institutions need an untainted outsider to parachute in. Someone who isn’t married to the nuances of an existing system. But theorizing is easy to do when you’re not tethered to the results. In healthcare, it’s not just financial results the consultants are off the hook for, it’s people’s lives. What do providers get with a legacy consulting firm? Well, a sizable stack of documents. With massive fees to match. While a 300-page PDF may impress at first blush, it won’t lead to actionable, sustainable solutions. It certainly won’t allow the health system to rapidly test and refine new models of care delivery, proving which ideas do and dont work in practice. Time pressure and fitting solutions in boxes At Cactus, the design firm I cofounded, one of our clients was let go from a major health system as part of a big consulting cost-cutting round. He had been working to reduce staffing shortages and developed a novel method for care teams to work together more efficiently, freeing up precious time for overworked nurses. Despite having proven results, he was let go because the consultants couldnt fit his already-implemented, already-proven solution into their model. He has now founded a business to sell that same method to health systems as a SaaS business. Traditional consulting firms also worsen a key challenge in healthcare: time pressure. Most health systems plan year-to-year based on government reimbursements. With revenue cycles already complex, consultants often default to short-term cost cuttingan easier sell than long-term change. The result? Innovation stalls, patient experience suffers, and the cycle repeats. If it’s so difficult, why not just leave healthcare alone? Because clearly, patients want better services. And by and large, those closest to the patient aren’t the problem. There is an abundance of clinical excellence in the United States but this doesn’t always translate to the best outcomes or patient experiences. The disconnect lies in how we approach system-level change. While working with a leading cancer center, my team found a big pain point for doctors: low compliancein other words patients werent following instructions. Research revealed that while treatment plans (housed in large binders) were technically sound, they werent tailored to patients. As a result, patients would underperform. We found that clearer communication, organized around actionable items and digestible content, could drive meaningful improvement. This user experiencefirst investigation, which centered on the needs of both doctors (frustrated by low compliance) and patients (overwhelmed by information), is rarely prioritized in traditional consulting models but is core to a more modern, design-led approach. The house renovation problem Imagine you’re renovating a Victorian mansion with a funky layout. The big consulting approach would be to tell the construction team to spend the allotted budget on turning the largest bedroom into two bedrooms, thereby increasing the home value. Maybe they’d advise a fresh coat of light grey paint, chosen to be least likely to offend potential buyers. But what if the person buying the home doesn’t have people to fill those bedrooms? What if they would be happier with a bolder color? What if in the process of splitting the bedroom, the floorboards are found to have mold? Well, the suit-clad consultants are already gone. You’re on your own, kid. Now imagine a design-led approach. In this scenario, the firm leading strategy is also the one implementing the changes. They spend the budget shifting the plumbing, dealing with mold issues as they arise. They don’t add another bedroom because it’s not needed, even if it would theoretically increase value. They try out a few paint swatches and see market appetite for bolder colors. Buyers are happierthey’re willing to pay more! Everyone wins. From slide decks to solutions Apply this rubric to healthcare. A design-led approach can balance strategic and business goals with the realities of user experience and complexities of implementation. Consultants that also build can pilot innovations faster, see results faster, reducing overall risk and cost. This type of team can rapidly experiment and improve in a virtuous cycle like the best startups do. Design-led consulting firms that implement their own changes also have a higher stake in outcomes. They create working prototypes before prescribing final solutions. They iterate based on real-world feedback. This way mistakes are found fast and plans are adjusted before scaling, saving cost and allowing faster and more thorough implementation. A call to healthcare leaders To healthcare leaders, I ask: What could you ship in the next 90 days with a design-led approach? What might still be sitting in a binder three years from now with traditional consulting? If the answer is something that could change people’s lives, and I suspect it is, it might be time to ditch the big guys. Design-led firms offer a fundamentally different relationship: partners who share your risk, commit to real-world results, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty implementing solutions. They bring technical talent alongside strategic thinking. They work in weeks, not quarters. Most importantly, they are judged by what they build, not what they recommend. The question isn’t whether you can afford this approach. The question is whether you can afford not to try it. Because while big consulting firms continue collecting their checks for delivering their slide decks, your patients and workforce are waiting for something better. They deserve it. And with the right partners, you can finally deliver it. Noah Waxman is CEO and cofounder at Cactus.
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E-Commerce
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