This tactic could sorta make sense – if narrowly directed at "princelings" who are children of top officials, rather than top students we'd love to have stay in the US. (I don't have much hope clumsy trade/immigration bureaucracies & grandstanding politicians can be that subtle, though.)
There's enough mutual affinity, interchange, & commerce that this current political/trade spat hasn't had much of a racial character, in its rhetoric or reasoning, as far as I've seen.
I would agree except that it's one hundred years later and there are Uighur re-education camps and social credit scores and new islands in the South China Sea with missile platforms and statements about reconquering Taiwan and... well.
