Once again it‘s the mad season down at the visa section of the American embassy in Beijing, as thousands of students apply for the visas they need in order to begin academic programs in the US this autumn. Unfortunately the madness this year is not just in the crowds; it seems to have infected the consular staff as well. The inscrutable beings behind the glass are rejecting an unprecedented proportion of visa applicants with full or nearly full scholarships, exactly the kind of people who in past years were pretty certain to get a visa on their first try. This means that large numbers of people must go in for a second or third interview, often as much as a month after the previous one. The “work load” that visa officials use to justify the long waiting periods is of their own making - an epidemic of ill-considered decisions by what I can only gather are

　　ill-trained personnel.

　　What to make of all this? The regulations governing visa matters have always been quite uncharacteristic of the American legal system, in that the applicant is assumed to be guilty of harboring a secret wish to stay in America unless he can prove otherwise - not innocent till proven guilty”. (In past years, mind you, a wise latitude was usually shown in such matters, perhaps reflecting some thought as to the intention of Congress when the law was framed.) What, really, can an applicant show or say to prove that five years hence an immediate return to China is in the cards? No one would attribute much long-term credibility to the vague career notions of an 18-year-old American, and young Americans have a far sharper sense of career possibilities than do their Chinese agemates. Yet somehow what young Chinese say is supposed to be of vast predictive significance.

　　The visa law has always been difficult to apply with any kind of clear logic. But if the visa section is now going to go about its work in quite a different spirit, producing very different results (and immense anger and sorrow), its directors have a moral responsibility to advise Chinese young people and US schools of these new realities in a timely fashion. That means when students are thinking of seeking admission to US schools or, at the latest, before universities make their decisions, not when the applicants step up to the windows in the visa hall. Of course I am speaking “only” of a moral responsibility, not a legal one.