The Netherlands will lose top semiconductor industry talent if the country maintains probing national security checks on Chinese students enrolled at its universities, Chinese state-run media reports and nationalistic commentators have asserted in the latest tech war tit-for-tat.
The Chinese comments came after Robert-Jan Smits, president of the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology, told Bloomberg earlier this month that the United States ambassador to the Netherlands had questioned him about why so many of his university’s students hail from China.
Smits said some restrictions have already been imposed as the university is extremely careful about allowing student access to the country’s top-notch sensitive technology. Eindhoven University is situated about eight kilometers from the global headquarters of ASML, the world’s biggest supplier of advanced chip-making equipment.
Bloomberg said more than a quarter of the Eindhoven University’s students are international. A further breakdown of that figure is not publicly available.
In May, ASML said it will expand its collaboration with Eindhoven University over the next decade through an 80 million euro (US$87 million) investment to support its research and training in areas including plasma physics, mechatronics, optics and artificial intelligence.
The university plans to invest over 100 million euros to set up a cleanroom, or dust-free environment, for the research of chip manufacturing processes and to finance its PhD student program over the next 10 years.
EUV lithography
The Netherlands is firmly in the middle of the US-China tech war. In 2019, the US asked the Dutch government to stop permitting the export of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) lithography equipment to China. The US has a say in the issue as it owns some essential patents for making EUV systems.
Without EUV lithography, Chinese chip makers only have the capacity to produce 7-nanometer chips, not the smaller ones that power more advanced applications. Meanwhile, Taiwanese and Korean firms are making 2-3nm chips, which are two to three generations ahead of 7nm chips.
Beijing clearly hopes that overseas Chinese students, including those enrolled in the Netherlands, can learn Western chip technology techniques and bring those skills back home to upgrade China’s lagging semiconductor sector.
“ASML has the EUV technology, which is an advanced technology urgently needed by our country,” a Henan-based columnist writes in an article published on July 29. “The US knows that our country is very weak in this area, so it urges the Netherlands to impose a technological blockage on us.”
The writer says the Netherlands has so far imposed some restrictions on the admission and course arrangements for Chinese students. He says Chinese students in the Netherlands have become unwitting victims of the US-China tech war. He says the US government is disrupting global cooperation in education, training and talent distribution under the guise of safeguarding national security.
“The US continues to suppress the development of China’s semiconductor sector and disrupt the industrial order by drawing an ASML-backed university into the so-called US-China chip war,” Yang Rong, a columnist at Guancha.cn, writes in an article.
Yang says the screening of Chinese students in the Netherlands is in line with the “unwarranted” interrogations and repatriations of Chinese students arriving in the US with valid travel permits earlier this year.
She says that although the US issued more student visas to Chinese students in 2023, only 290,000 Chinese students were studying in the US last year, down some 20% from 370,000 in 2019.
She asserts the US is taking “selective, discriminatory and politically motivated” law enforcement actions against Chinese students due to a new Cold War mentality.
Earlier this year, Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador in Washington, said dozens of Chinese holding valid visas have been denied entry to the US.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at least eight Chinese students had been deported groundlessly by US immigration authorities at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC.
‘Nuanced approach’
Delta, an independent Dutch news website from the Delft University of Technology, reported in April 2023 that there were about 2,000 Chinese PhD candidates who were receiving scholarships from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) in the Netherlands.
The report said these students must report their study progress to the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands every semester. The Dutch intelligence agency AIVD said at the time that Dutch universities are an “attractive target” for foreign spies, especially those from China.
The Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times said there were 5,610 Chinese students in the Netherlands, with 1,441 of them studying engineering, in 2023. The others were majoring in economics (1,422), language and culture (800) and natural sciences (600).
In June last year, the Dutch government said it was working on legislation to stop the admission of Chinese students to university programs on sensitive technologies, including defense and semiconductors. The new rules, if passed and implemented, would govern not only Chinese PhD students but also those from outside the European Union.
The legislation, however, has stalled in parliament. Dutch Education Minister Eppo Bruins, meanwhile, said the government would take a “nuanced approach” to avoid affecting the admission of many brilliant Chinese students.
A professor specializing in chip technology at Eindhoven University told Bloomberg that it’s now more difficult to recruit Chinese students. He said many of them now struggle to gain one-year internship experience as Dutch chip firms avoid hiring them.
US tech waar pressure
In his interview with Bloomberg, Eindhoven University’s Smits said Shefali Razdan Duggal, the US ambassador to the Netherlands, had urged him to be careful with Chinese students. However, he said the US government continued to give all kinds of visas to Chinese students to attend American universities.
In 2019, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reportedly urged at least 10 American universities to actively monitor Chinese students and visiting scholars to see what information they were being exposed to.
It also urged university administrators to increase oversight of Chinese researchers and to avoid accepting project funding from Chinese tech firms such as the sanctioned Huawei. Since then, a growing number of American universities have limited Chinese students’ access to sensitive technology.
However, there are not enough American students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based non-profit organization, last month.
He suggested the US could start to recruit more international students in those fields from India rather than China. The US should welcome Chinese students if they come to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics, Campbell said.
According to Statista.com, about 23.2% of the 290,000 Chinese students in the US were studying mathematics and computing science in the academic year spanning 2022 and 2023. The others were studying engineering (16.8%), business/management (13.4%), social sciences (11.2%) and physics/life sciences (9.8%), the Statista data showed.
Read: China’s legacy chips in EU’s crosshairs
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