U.S. Education Policy Toward China, 2017–2026: Higher-Education Governance, Research Security, and Conditional Engagement

Abstract

Higher-education cooperation was once a major area of U.S.–China engagement, but since 2017 it has increasingly been governed through research-security and risk-management requirements. This article analyzes how U.S. federal policy toward China between 2017 and 2026 has reshaped the governance of higher-education internationalization. Using a qualitative documentary analysis of a purposively selected corpus of U.S. legal and policy documents, federal reports, and peer-reviewed studies, it examines three policy domains: student and researcher mobility; academic and research cooperation; and China-linked educational organizations and partnerships. The findings show that policy combines selective restriction with conditional engagement: exchange and cooperation continue, but access, funding, and partnerships are increasingly conditioned on screening, disclosure, and institutional risk management. The article contributes a cross-domain synthesis showing how different policy instruments allocate responsibilities for risk assessment to universities and researchers, and it discusses the limits of the evidence on unintended consequences for scientific collaboration. Because the study relies on documentary sources and includes no institutional data from Vietnam, its implications for Vietnamese higher education are presented as conditional questions for institutions to assess rather than as empirical findings.