[VT | September 17, 2026 | Online]
As President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Washington, competition between the United States and China spans trade, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and national security.
Running through several of those issues is another question: where will the people who build the next generation of science and technology choose to build their futures?
Four months after meeting in Beijing, Trump and Xi are preparing to meet again in Washington.
The May summit established a broader framework for the relationship: a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.” But stability between two countries does not mean the competition between them has disappeared.
Trade and investment remain part of the relationship. So do artificial intelligence, biotechnology, national security and the movement of people between the two countries.
Ahead of the September 24 Trump-Xi meeting, a September 17 press briefing at the Center for Strategic and International Studies offered a view of just how broad that policy landscape has become.
The discussion brought together Edgard D. Kagan, Senior Adviser and Freeman Chair in China Studies; Scott Kennedy, Senior Adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics; Bonny Lin, Director of the China Power Project and Senior Adviser; Aalok Mehta, Director of the Wadhwani AI Center; and Michaela Simoneau, Fellow with the Global Health Policy Center.
Kagan examined the diplomatic and strategic setting surrounding the summit. Kennedy focused on trade, economics and the commercial relationship. Lin addressed security questions, including Taiwan and military communication. Mehta examined artificial intelligence and the rapidly changing technological competition between the two countries. Simoneau brought another emerging field into the discussion: health security, biotechnology and the bioeconomy.
Talent was not one of the briefing’s separate policy categories. Yet it ran underneath several of them.
When Simoneau described what the United States would need to remain competitive in biotechnology, she pointed to a complementary industrial strategy involving investments in data systems, talent and regulatory reform “here at home.”
Talent, in other words, appeared as part of American domestic industrial strategy rather than as a separate item on the bilateral agenda.
But the same people who make that strategy possible also move through immigration systems, universities, laboratories, companies and increasingly complicated national-security environments.
Economic competition requires people.
AI competition requires people.
Biotechnology requires people.
And national-security policy increasingly determines how some of those same people are able to study, conduct research, collaborate and move between countries.
During the briefing, ChineseinUS raised that intersection with Kennedy: as uncertainty surrounding F-1 and H-1B policies affects international students and workers, and as the United States competes with China in AI, biotechnology and other advanced fields, how should the United States think about attracting and retaining scientific and technological talent from China and the rest of the world?
Kennedy later provided ChineseinUS with a written response.
His answer drew a distinction between two interests that can become difficult to separate in practice: enforcing U.S. laws against criminal and intelligence activity, and maintaining America’s ability to attract leading scholars and experts from around the world, including China.
Both, he argued, are national interests.
The United States Still Depends on International Talent
The scale of that dependence is visible in American science and engineering.
In 2024, temporary visa holders earned 61 percent of U.S. doctorates in computer and information sciences and 54 percent in engineering, according to the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
For science and engineering doctorate holders originally from China, the connection often lasts well beyond graduation.
NCSES reported that U.S.-trained S&E doctorate holders from China had similar short- and long-term stay rates — about 84 percent. The short-term measure looks roughly five years after graduation and the long-term measure roughly 10 years after graduation, using different doctoral cohorts. The figures do not describe all Chinese students or immigrants, but they show how international education can become part of the long-term American scientific workforce.
There is no single “talent visa.”
An international student may enter through F-1 status and later work through Optional Practical Training. Researchers and scholars can come through J-1 exchange programs. Specialty workers may use H-1B visas. Highly accomplished researchers and professionals may qualify through other pathways.
The State Department also continues to operate its Early Career STEM Research Initiative through BridgeUSA, connecting U.S. STEM businesses and research institutions with J-1 exchange visitors seeking research and training opportunities through Department-designated sponsors. Eligible categories include College and University Students, Interns, Trainees, Specialists, Short-Term Scholars, Professors and Research Scholars.
At the same time, other parts of the system remain unsettled.
On September 18, Trump extended for another year a 2025 proclamation restricting the entry of certain H-1B workers unless their petitions are accompanied by a $100,000 payment, subject to specified exceptions. The proclamation applies to certain prospective H-1B workers outside the United States; it does not generally cover foreign graduates already in the United States seeking to change status.
But the payment requirement is also tied up in litigation. A federal district court struck down the government’s implementation of the $100,000 requirement in June, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined in July to stay that ruling while the government appeals. The September proclamation therefore extends the policy framework, but does not by itself make the payment requirement currently enforceable.
A separate executive order signed the same day directs increased interagency coordination in H-1B adjudications and requires agencies to consider whether sponsoring employers have conducted layoffs within the previous year or plan future layoffs affecting similarly situated U.S. workers. The Labor Department is also directed to begin reviewing previously submitted labor condition applications for possible further action. That order is separate from the litigation over the $100,000 payment requirement.
The policy debate nevertheless reveals a tension in how the administration describes the H-1B system. The proclamation argues that abuse of the program has displaced American workers and suppressed wages. At the same time, it says such abuse has made it more difficult for the United States to attract and retain the most highly skilled temporary workers.
Protect American workers.
Attract global talent.
Those objectives remain part of the same policy debate, even as different parts of the administration’s H-1B policy are moving through different legal and administrative channels.
China Is Competing for Talent, Too
Across the Pacific, China has been adjusting its own system.
In October 2025, China introduced a new K visa for eligible young foreign science and technology professionals, after the State Council amended the country’s regulations governing the entry and exit of foreigners.
The new category, established under State Council Order No. 814, does not require applicants to have a domestic employer or inviting organization. Chinese authorities described it as a way to facilitate exchanges and cooperation involving young international science and technology professionals.
Yet China has also been having its own argument about international experience and trust.
On April 22, 2025, during Gree Electric’s first extraordinary shareholders’ meeting of the year, chairwoman Dong Mingzhu said the company would not use overseas returnees in its management pipeline, citing concerns that spies could be among them and that she could not determine who might pose such a risk. Her remarks drew substantial criticism in China.
Dong is a business executive. Her remarks were not Chinese government policy.
Nor is China’s K visa a policy toward Chinese citizens returning from overseas.
But placed beside each other, the two developments reveal a question that is not entirely foreign to either side of the Pacific:
When does international experience become an advantage — and when does it become a source of suspicion?
The People Inside the Competition
That question becomes particularly complicated in the United States because U.S.-China competition does not involve only temporary visitors.
Chinese Americans include U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, permanent residents, students, scientists, entrepreneurs and families that have lived in the country for generations.
And concerns about security can reach into scientific life.
In 2021, the Committee of 100 and the University of Arizona conducted a nationwide blind survey involving 1,949 scientists at U.S. colleges and universities.
Among scientists of Chinese descent surveyed, 42.2 percent said they felt racially profiled by the U.S. government, compared with 8.6 percent of scientists of non-Chinese descent. And 50.7 percent reported considerable fear or anxiety about government surveillance, compared with 11.7 percent of scientists of non-Chinese descent. Researchers also found evidence that some scientists were reconsidering collaboration, federal funding and whether to remain in the United States.
Those numbers come from 2021, during the period of the Justice Department’s China Initiative. They should not be read as measurements of the scientific community in 2026.
But the underlying question has not disappeared.
A March 2026 study by the Committee of 100 and NORC at the University of Chicago examined what researchers describe as the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype. It found that 55 percent of Asian Americans regularly experienced assumptions that they were foreign. Birthplace made almost no difference: the rate was 53 percent among U.S.-born Asian Americans and 56 percent among those born abroad.
The studies measure different populations, different experiences and different moments in time. Neither provides a simple answer to current U.S. talent policy.
They do, however, add another dimension to the competition for talent.
Getting someone into a university or laboratory is one question.
Whether that person decides to spend the next 10, 20 or 30 years building a career, company, laboratory, family and future in the country is another.
Between Two Systems
The same person can look very different depending on where the institutional lens is placed.
A Chinese student can arrive in the United States for graduate school, become an engineer or researcher, and spend years contributing to an American company or laboratory.
A scientist trained in the United States can return to China carrying knowledge, professional relationships and international experience.
A researcher can collaborate across borders while working inside institutions increasingly concerned about research security.
And an AI engineer or biotechnology researcher can become part of an economic competition between two countries without ever thinking of his or her career primarily in geopolitical terms.
That is what makes talent different from many of the other issues surrounding a presidential summit.
Trade can be measured in goods and dollars. Technology competition can be measured in chips, computing capacity, patents and investment.
Talent is shaped by individual decisions — which universities people attend, which laboratories they join, where they work, whether they stay or leave, where they start companies and where they raise families.
The United States and China both have reasons to care about those choices. They also both have national-security concerns.
The difficult territory lies where those interests meet the lives of actual people.
Four months ago in Beijing, Trump and Xi described their relationship through the language of strategic stability.
This week in Washington, trade, security, AI, biotechnology and other issues will again surround their discussions.
But beneath several of those policy debates is another competition — one that will not be decided only by governments.
If strategic stability is the goal, what does stability look like for the people who actually move between the two systems?
