- calendar_today August 21, 2025
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Donald Trump said Monday that the U.S. would accept 600,000 Chinese students at American colleges in a move that could signal a thawing of relations between Washington and Beijing, which has been roiled by months of tariff tensions.
Trump, speaking from the White House, made the comments as he continued to levy broad tariffs on Beijing and promised to slap further restrictions on Chinese imports to the U.S. in the coming weeks.
“The students are going to be coming in, these young, beautiful, smart people, they’re going to be coming into our schools and they’re going to be studying,” Trump told reporters. “I hear so many stories that we’re not going to allow their students. They’re going to be coming in. It’s very important. 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”
The offer came as talks to further ease tensions between the two largest economies in the world have continued to hit snags and sparked fears of a trade war. Last week, Trump announced a 145 percent tariff on all Chinese goods coming into the U.S. Earlier this year, China imposed a 125 percent tariff on all U.S. exports sent to Beijing.
Trump, who in May sent out a team of negotiators to Geneva to work out an agreement that would pause new levies, has signaled in recent weeks that he may impose further restrictions on Chinese-made goods. On Friday, he hinted that he may levy a 200 percent tariff on magnets made in China, saying the country had “a monopoly, a very close to a hundred percent monopoly” on their manufacture.
“We’d have to take in tremendous amounts of steel, where our steelworkers would be wiped out by this, to make magnets,” Trump said. “China, intelligently, went and they sort of took a monopoly on the world’s magnets. It’ll probably take us a year to have them.”
China sends about 270,000 students to the U.S. to attend school each year. Trump’s promise that 600,000 students would be allowed to do so in the coming months would nearly double the number of Chinese students permitted in the country, and potentially lead to a windfall for U.S. universities, which rely heavily on foreign students for tuition revenue.
In May, State Secretary Marco Rubio announced the Trump administration was planning to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese people who work for the Chinese Communist Party or conduct scientific research for China. The announcement came as a shock to the higher education community, and universities quickly pushed back, saying the move would be detrimental to talent and tuition.
In June, Trump appeared to take a softer line on students, telling reporters, “I’ve always been in favor of letting the students come in. I really have.” In an interview with The Hill this month, Trump said that “you’re going to see a reduction, substantially, of Chinese students going to college in the United States, because the costs are getting so high for them.”
But on Monday, he appeared to reverse course and take a more aggressive tack against Beijing. “If you talk about relationships, we’re not having a good relationship with China,” Trump said. “But China wants to make a deal, and I’m ready to make a deal. They’re making a fortune on our taxes, on the billions and billions of dollars we’re taking in.”
Trump said he would be open to meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a summit this year. “It’s a very important relationship because we are taking in a lot of money from China,” Trump said. “It’s a very important relationship economically because of the tariffs and the different things.”
“We’re not playing games with each other. The relationship is a very good one right now economically,” Trump added. “It’s a much better relationship economically than it was with Biden. But he allowed that. They just took him to the cleaners.”
Trump spoke just hours before a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. At the moment, Trump told reporters, he was not prepared to sign a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula, though he expected his successor, Joe Biden, to do so.
