Apparently it’s the 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and Steven Hayward over at Power Line had an interesting brainwave to help commemorate the tragedy:

Almost 12 or 15 years ago now I was teaching a class at Georgetown as a visiting lecturer, and one of my students was a young Chinese lady who seemed very bright, though quiet as most Chinese students are in my experience. But one day after class, chatting at the pub, she said, “I’ve seen your Internet. Everything about Tiananmen Square is wrong.” She explained to me that the student protesters had attacked the police and the army, and that the government had no choice but to crack down hard. Pretty clearly the Party line. A few follow up questions yielded the fact her parents were members in good standing of the Chinese Communist Party, but that of course no one really believed in Marxism-Leninism any more.

A couple weeks later this young lady turned in the best midterm paper in the class (out of about 40 total), analyzing the statesmanship of Churchill. I did wonder about this—I have had a few highly capable Chinese students who produced superb work and displayed genuine interest in and passion for American ideas (and Tocqueville in one notable case—I use these opportunities to corrupt Chinese students as much as possible), but in this case I was suspicious that the paper was so good that it had to be either plagiarized or written for her by someone else. (This was in the days before various internet tools to check for plagiarism were available.)

A week later, the young lady informed me that she had to withdraw from the class and return to China immediately because of some emergency with her home university. Which sounded totally bogus.

I suspected at the time, and even more so today, that this capable young lady was in fact a spy. We’ve learned a lot since then about organized Chinese efforts to infiltrate American universities to conduct industrial espionage. My class would have been very unsuitable to gaining any useful industrial intelligence, unless you think my session on Alexander Hamilton on manufacturing was helpful.

Which brings me to Trump’s aggressive trade strategy. I can support it, though it makes me very nervous because I think it might fail catastrophically. But I’ll give Trump a lot of running room on this; he is the only president who might be able to carry this off, precisely because of the qualities that so many liberals deplore about him.

But I like this idea better: tell China that if they don’t reform their predatory trade practices, we’ll cut off all student visas for Chinese students at American universities. What are they going to do—send their students to German and French colleges where Chinese students don’t know the language? Think British and Australian universities can absorb that many Chinese students? Do you think they want that many Chinese students? Of course they don’t.

That is, in fact, an absolutely ingenious idea.

I did my Master’s degree in mathematical finance at a quite prestigious university in the USA. Undergraduate universities at the country’s elite schools are no longer worth the paper they are printed on – I regard the average Harvard undergraduate these days as little better than a wet nappy, and about as intelligent. But, postgraduate degrees at the country’s best universities really are very good, and – as long as they are in STEM fields – generally are worth paying for.

However – those same STEM degrees tend to be absolutely flooded with Asians from overseas.

In my class, all those many years ago, the composition was well over 50% international. The students came primarily from China, India, France, and Russia. This is not coincidental. All four of those nations produce extremely high-quality technical undergraduates – though in India’s case, I would argue that the country’s much-ballyhooed “IT worker class” is largely overhyped.

And, of course, inevitably those various national groups tended to stick together.

The most insufferable out of the lot were always the French and the Chinese. The French were insufferable because, well, France, and the Chinese were insufferable because, when Chinese people get together in large numbers, they insist on making it very clear that they have no interest whatsoever in mingling with, or accommodating, anyone else.

On an individual basis, though, the Chinese students were quite good folks. I liked them, overall, with a couple of specific exceptions whose names I have completely forgotten and cannot be arsed to go back and look up.

That being said – I do not doubt for a moment that one or two of them were there for not entirely enlightened reasons.

The Chinese have used postgraduate education in the USA as a perfect conduit for stealing American technology and knowledge. That has been known for decades. It is nothing new and is merely a middling form of espionage, but it has resulted in a massive industrial and technological transfer to China from the USA – which the Americans paid for.

Cutting off that inflow of Chinese students is, indeed, discriminatory government policy. However, it is also in the interests of the American nation to do so.

There is already a significant imbalance within the working population at American banking and tech companies. I can relate from my own time in the banking industry the fact that most of the technical jobs were not done by Americans. The IT, P&L, risk management, and other challenging mathematically inclined jobs were generally staffed by Chinese and Indians. As I recall, the product control team of the bank where I used to work had precisely one white American male – bloke from Arizona, in fact, really cool dude – out of like 20 people. The rest were Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Polish, Russian – you name it, but NOT American.

Meanwhile, the accountants and bean-counters, well, they were almost entirely American.

That massive differential cannot possibly be due to the superior skills of the Indian and Chinese workers. I know, because I used to sit with them every single day and help fix their daily issues. They weren’t smarter than me, and they weren’t smarter than the white Americans that I worked with either. The job wasn’t that difficult to do, especially after my team and I got through sorting out all of the shitty systems to the best of our abilities – which were considerable.

From my own personal experience, the differences between the P&L and risk guys, and the accounting guys, was not intelligence. It came down to their willingness to sit in those chairs for hours after 5pm and close out the books.

That is why the accounting folks tended to be solidly 50%, or more, female – and the RPL guys used to be 95% male.

And it is not a coincidence, at all, that Chinese bosses tended to hire Chinese underlings.

This was unique to them, from what I could see. I worked with a Polish guy who had no problem whatsoever interviewing Chinese, Indian, Russian, Turkish, American, or even Martian candidates for a role. But my Chinese colleague, who eventually ended up taking over my team for a while, focused exclusively on interviewing Chinese candidates.

The lessons here are very, very clear. If you invite in Chinese workers who may or may not be paid government agents of a power hostile to the United States, and then give them access to the American education system – which, in its postgraduate form, is still the very best in the world – and then let them get into your top companies and government subcontractors… don’t then act surprised when they turn around and start stealing your shit.

It’s not because the Chinese themselves are bad people. They aren’t. They are racists – some of the most racist people in the world, in fact – but they are not otherwise particularly bad folk.

It’s because the Chinese are loyal to their nation. And that nation has a national identity, and a desire to take what it wants from the rest of the world, and to hell with the consequences.

The Chinese and American nations are not compatible. They come from completely different traditions, cultures, races, histories, languages, and religions. So don’t confuse them.

If America really wants China to feel the pain of its actions and understand that its bad behaviour has consequences, then simply stop Chinese students from coming over, stealing America’s most advanced technology and trade secrets, and in the process financially cripple some of the most SJW-converged institutions in the country.

I rather fail to see the downside here. Anyone care to explain it to me and try to change my mind?

And while we’re on the subject of Tiananmen Square…: