Trump is cracking down on China. Now UC campuses are paying the price
LOS ANGELES - University of California, San Diego professor Shirley Meng's laboratory is a veritable United Nations of research, with 48 scholars from six different countries exploring how to improve battery storage for electric vehicles, robots and - someday - flying cars.
But Meng and her colleagues worry that one country soon will be left out of the lab: China.
The Trump administration has intensified its crackdown over trade, technology and security - and now it has spread to America's vaunted universities, turning the University of California into an especially big target.
UC campuses from San Diego to Berkeley are reporting that Chinese students and scholars are encountering visa delays, federal scrutiny over their research activities and new restrictions on collaboration with China and Chinese companies.
The National Institutes of Health, a major source of university research funding, also has raised questions about current and former scientists at UC's Berkeley, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego and San Francisco campuses, prompting reviews of whether they followed federal grant rules, including confidentiality requirements and disclosures of outside support.
The overarching fear is that President
