President Donald Trump announced the United States is prepared to accept up to 600,000 Chinese students as part of a trade deal his administration is trying to strike with China.
“We’re going to allow, it’s very important, 600,000 students,” Trump told reporters Monday at the White House. “We’re going to get along with China. But it’s a different relationship that we have now with China.”
Trump made the announcement ahead of a bilateral meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung after he was asked when he would sit down with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I’d like to meet him this year. President Xi would like me to come to China,” he said. “We’re taking a lot of money in from China because of the tariffs and different things.… It’s a much better relationship economically than it was before with [former President Joe] Biden. I mean, they just took him to the cleaners.”
The Trump administration has clamped down on the number of student visa holders, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio promising in May to “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, suggesting that suspected connections to the Chinese Communist Party would be one criterion.
Trump in June previewed the U.S.’s acceptance of Chinese students but did not provide details regarding the number. It is unclear what window Trump would set for admissions. As of last year, more than 270,000 Chinese students were enrolled at U.S. universities.
On Monday, Trump reiterated that a trade deal with China must also account for the sale of magnets, or else the U.S. would impose a “200% tariff or something.”
“We’re not going to have a problem, I don’t think, with that,” the president said. “China, intelligently, went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets. And nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, let’s all do magnets. There were many other ways that the world could have gone, but so far, it’ll take us probably a year to have them.”
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He continued, “I spoke to President Xi fairly recently and, at some point, probably during this year or shortly thereafter, we’ll go to China. And I think we’re going to see a magnificent sight. It’s a great country.”
On Aug. 11, Trump signed another executive order extending the deadline for the U.S. and China to reach a trade deal by another 90 days to Nov. 10. Previously, the president had threatened tariffs of 145%, to which China had retaliated with its own 125% duties.