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Former U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States would welcome 600,000 Chinese students to its colleges and universities — potentially providing a welcome reprieve in U.S.-China relations after months of tariff escalations.

Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump said he was softening his previous restrictions on Chinese student visas. “I hear so many stories that we’re not going to allow their students,” he told reporters. “We’re going to allow their students to come in. It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”

The announcement followed Trump’s decision to continue pressuring Beijing with broad tariffs and threats of further trade barriers. Last week, Trump raised the possibility of a 200 percent tariff on Chinese-made magnets, one of a number of industrial sectors in which Beijing has a near-complete monopoly.

“China, very intelligently, went and they sort of took a monopoly on the world’s magnets,” Trump said Monday. “It’ll probably take us a year to have them.”

Negotiations on the two countries’ economic relationship have run hot and cold this year, after an agreement brokered in Geneva in May gave both sides a reprieve from levying new tariffs. Since then, Trump has issued threats of new tariffs almost weekly; last week’s magnet tariffs were the most extreme.

Washington slapped a 145 percent tariff on all Chinese exports in February, spurring Beijing to retaliate with a 125 percent levy on U.S. goods. The back-and-forth tariffs have raised the prospect of a long, drawn-out standoff between the two economic powers.

Though about 270,000 Chinese nationals currently study in the U.S., Trump’s 600,000-student figure would more than double that number. Universities in the U.S. have long depended on tuition and other fees from foreign students, which totaled $45 billion in 2019, according to the American Council on Education. The vast majority of foreign students, in turn, come from China, which regularly tops enrollment rankings for international enrollment.

A Retreat From Hardline Stance On Chinese Visas

The 600,000-student figure also marks a retreat from the Trump administration’s hardline stance on Chinese student visas in recent months. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. would “aggressively revoke” visas for “Chinese Communist Party members” and researchers who study fields like artificial intelligence and quantum technology.

Rubio’s comments prompted outcry from university officials and other members of the academic community, with one university president telling the New York Times that the policy would “cause a lot of collateral damage, a lot of people on our campuses who we have come to rely upon and we would miss.”

Trump himself appeared to reverse course on the student visa policy last month, saying he had “always been in favor of students coming in from China.” Monday’s comments reiterated that position, and drew a bright line between academic exchange and the government’s broader trade and national security concerns.

Trump’s comments on Monday came ahead of a meeting later in the day with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. Asked if he would be open to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said: “I would like to meet him this year. We’ll see what happens. I think it’s very important to get along.”

“The relationship is very good economically, very good,” Trump added, without elaborating. “As you know, we’re taking a lot of money in from China because of the tariffs and the different things. It’s a very important relationship. It’s a much better relationship economically than it was before with Biden. But he allowed that. They just took him to the cleaners.”

Pairing the Chinese student visa comments with remarks on tariffs and the possibility of a meeting with Xi, Trump indicated that his administration was not planning to scale back on economic competition, but would still keep open some channels of cooperation with Beijing. The comments also appeared to suggest that education and people-to-people ties would be a key part of his administration’s foreign policy with China and other countries.