Speaking recently at a reception after Nvidia’s Global Technology Conference in Washington, DC, Jensen Huang energetically made a case for economic interconnectedness with China. U.S. universities loom large in Huang’s optimistic plan to continue attracting China’s best and brightest.
In the words of Huang, “They’re just Chinese. They want to come here to develop.” Exactly.
The exciting news, news that is positive from an economic growth and world peace standpoint, is that Huang’s infectious excitement about what the U.S. can be seems to be rubbing off on President Trump. According to a recent opinion piece by Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post, Trump has reversed his growth and peace-sapping promises “to ‘aggressively revoke’ visas of Chinese students in the United States ‘including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.’”
Notable about what Thiessen writes is that the frequently pro-Trump columnist views Trump’s reversal on Chinese students as “a terrible idea.” Huang and Trump are right while Thiessen is not.
Let’s start with the crucial, growth-enhancing truth that the arrival of talented people from around the world isn’t the stuff of job loss for Americans. More realistically, talent is a job multiplier precisely because talent is a magnet for the very investment that drives job creation.
Moving to national security, Thiessen views the arrival of more Chinese students as a threat, while Huang wisely recognizes that “If we can grow economically, we will be strong militarily.” Which helps explain his desire to lay out the welcome mat to talented Chinese students eager to develop their skills at U.S. universities. If they come here for school maybe, hopefully, they’ll stay.
Talented people once again aren’t a burden, they’re an essential input. This is crucial to remember given Huang’s proud assertion that America’s technology industry is our “national treasure.” Huang is speaking Trump’s language.
While’s there’s been much disagreement with Trump about trade, immigration, and the federal government’s role in the U.S. economy in this column, it’s exciting to see Huang reach Trump as other U.S. business leaders haven’t always. That’s because Huang ties the arrival of brilliant, ambitious people to ongoing U.S. prominence and dominance in the technology space in a way that plainly appeals to Trump. This is once again great for economic growth, and by extension great for national security.
Which brings us back to Thiessen. He cites an FBI report that “China is engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students and researchers to conduct espionage and steal ‘technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals.’” It all sounds so spooky, but let’s briefly take Thiessen and the FBI’s experts at their word. If so, President Trump and Huang are still correct, and for obvious reasons.
For one, what better way to dampen any malice toward the U.S. among the Chinese elites (the non-elites plainly love the U.S.) than to have the children of the elites at the best of the best U.S. universities in all their splendor. Sorry, but it’s difficult to hate a nation populated with universities that provide unparallelled knowledge, experience, and hopefully, post-collegiate job options.
Next, what could make the U.S. safer from armed conflict with China than having the offspring of Chinese elites sprinkled across the United States? Hopefully the question answers itself, at which point people recognize that the worst idea for American technology and national security would be for the U.S. to embrace the exclusionary thinking of Marc Thiessen and China hawks more broadly.
