Chinese students have become the largest group of international students in the UK despite deteriorated China-UK relations, with analysts saying that the situation is caused by both the impact of visa restrictions from the US on Chinese students and the UK's attempts to maintain normal cultural exchanges.
Around 216,000 Chinese students are now studying in the UK, according to the Chinese Embassy in the UK. Meanwhile, the number of entrants from China for higher education in the UK each year since the admission year 2012-13 has exceeded the number of all EU countries combined and continues to rise, surpassing 100,000 in the 2019-20 academic year, based on statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, a UK-based agency responsible for handling data on the country's higher education.
Statistics from the US show that the number of Chinese college students has been stable at 360,000 since 2017, according to 2021 data from Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data.
