> adults representing a national government

Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed. If they're coming out of a brainwashed environment, they may never have been explicitly told that this is wrong; they deserve a second chance.

> message needs to be received in Beijing, not merely Indiana

I agree. My vote would be for a new foreign-student visa ban on the children of CCP members until Beijing commits to quit being petulant. But hit Beijing, the people commanding spooks to harass the parents of a student in a different country telling historical stories that scare them.

>Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids.

US universities are famously litigious and take a hard line stance when it suits them. See Aaron Swartz. So, I don't buy the 'they are still kids' line. That is, I don't condone it, but I don't agree that universities are motivated by this sort of reasoning.

> US universities are famously litigious and take a hard line stance when it suits them. See Aaron Swartz.

MIT was not a party to the lawsuit against Aaron Swartz, nor was even JSTOR. It was brought entirely by the US Attorney for Massachusetts.

They claim that after the fact, after the bad press, I believe neither JSTOR or MIT

You don't have to believe them. You can look at the court records yourself, or any number of public case summaries[1].

To quote:

> Opting not to pursue a civil lawsuit against him, JSTOR reached a settlement with him in the summer of 2011 in which Swartz turned over the downloaded data to them. It was never released to the public. Neither did MIT take any civil action against him.

The lawsuit was a purely Justice initiative.

[1]: https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/law-and-legal...

> You can look at the court records yourself

The problem with referring to the official record is that one misses what isn't in the official record.

> social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed

If they are mature enough for the Chinese government to shoot them in the head for peaceful protesting, then they are mature enough to understand that some democratic cultures have strong objections against the CCP and those who do their bidding.

It's one of those things where the real world is too dangerous to allow kids to be kids: you must tell 5 year olds that magic capes can't help them fly, and that they should run away from strange men who wish to touch their peepee, even if, for an ideally happy childhood, you shouldn't have to.

There is no such social consensus. People act according to expectations. If we expect college students to act like adults then they will. I certainly didn't feel like a kid when I was in college.

It's bizarre how some societies have lowered their expectations of young people over the past couple centuries. When Horatio Nelson was that age he was captain of a warship, leading hundreds of men in combat and doing a pretty fine job of it.

> Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed. If they're coming out of a brainwashed environment, they may never have been explicitly told that this is wrong; they deserve a second chance.

I really don't think we do have such a consensus. The post-high school (for those who graduated) 18-year-olds from my old neighborhood who committed offenses didn't get this consideration. They went to jail. Knowing their home lives growing up, it was no surprise to anyone that they committed the offenses they committed. It's difficult to see how they could have done otherwise. They weren't explicitly brainwashed, but they grew up in an environment that warped their world view as thoroughly as any Chinese propaganda could have done.

In the United States, we've also tried children as young as 11 years old as adults.

I think there is a social consensus to give college students a pass.

They're old enough to be in the army, so they're old enough to be kicked out of the country for spying.

Showing them a kindness that they wouldn't receive back home might break through to them, or it might not. The situation should definitely carry gravity and have consequences for repeat offenses.

I think a bigger problem is two-fold:

1) Universities are addicted to Chinese student tuition funds, and they don't want to rock the boat. I doubt they care as much about the students themselves. My university totally half assed their program (eg. some Chinese students would have questions that went unanswered, professors tended to pay them less attention, etc.), and I felt so sorry for the students.

2) Chinese students tend to stick in groups together rather than be integrated and mixed amongst the other student populations. They're assigned the same dormitory blocks, do shopping/dining together, and they don't really get to experience America in the same way that other international students do. Not sure if this is due to design or negligence.

It is kind of interesting. At my college, we had large batches of students from (Mexican) migrant workers in our dorms. With very few exceptions the majority of two person dorms were 1:1 matching one of them with a second generation (and onwards) citizen. I thought it was a great way to expose all of us to both integration and diversity. It wasn't smooth for everyone of course, yet I thought it was a good balance of culturally jarring experiences, while still providing close proximity to people from the same background (e.g. several migrant worker kids in same hall still). I haven't really thought much about that since College but kind of assumed most places did something similar. (We also had specific classes that highlighted migrant worker issues / history).

Yes. One has to wonder just how many of these students are students, and not "students" — at Purdue & everywhere else.