Washington's impending visa revocations for select PRC students, predicated on putative links to the CCP and enrollment in strategically sensitive disciplines, has engendered a climate of pronounced precarity within the Chinese academic diaspora in the US; this contentious policy, impacting a cohort drawn from the PRC—the second largest contingent of international students in the US, numbering over 270,000 in the 2023-2024 academic year—has precipitated a formal démarche from Beijing, whose Foreign Ministry has characterised the measures as invidious and patently discriminatory, further exacerbating the already fraught bilateral relationship and prompting a discernible shift towards alternative educational destinations, with Hong Kong and other nations actively positioning themselves to capitalise on the resultant academic displacement.