There’s long been a gross imbalance in trade between the United States and China, but it’s not the imbalance you’re thinking of.

No, the trade gap I’m thinking of is an intellectual one — whereby the Communist Chinese are flooding American universities with some 275,000 of their students, while only a relative handful of Americans are studying at Chinese universities.

This Chinese incursion represents one-fourth of all international students on American campuses, and — commies being commies — they’re using this legion of students to study and pilfer both our intellectual property and our industrial and technological expertise. As such, Chinese students, especially those engaged in advanced study in technology and the hard sciences, pose a threat not only to our economic security but also to our national security.

Why are we so stupid? one might wonder.

Well, wonder no more. Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. will begin revoking the visas of these particular students. As a brief State Department press release reads:

Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.

This crackdown is long overdue because the ChiComs have already done enormous damage to us.

How enormous? Last year, the House Committee on Homeland Security spelled it out in a report detailing China’s theft of $300-600 billion worth of American technology and intellectual property every year.

Clearly, though, Donald Trump, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t cater to commies.

Indeed, what must Joe Biden think —inasmuch as he thinks about anything these days — about Trump’s crackdown on his friends the Chinese? Remember: Biden is the guy who took laundered money from the Chinese, then tried to reassure us that these rapacious commies were “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.”

“China is going to eat our lunch?” Biden chided. “Come on, man.”

I mean, what’s a little language, a little culture, and a little espionage between friends, right? As far as ingratiating ourselves to those lying, thieving, pandemic-spreading commies, what could go wrong?

As for the snatching up of those ChiCom student visas, a State Department spokesman said that the Trump administration was doing this to “protect Americans and rebalance” the U.S. relationship with China. “China exploited our visa system for decades to advance the priorities of the Communist Party,” he added. “They sent students to our best colleges and research universities. Many of these so-called guests in our country arrived with one purpose — to steal our intellectual property on Beijing’s behalf. The President’s goal is clear: we will put America first, and that means our priorities on everything from trade to immigration should benefit Americans, not other nations at the expense of our people.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. “I think it is terribly misguided, counterproductive and another way in which we are shooting ourselves in the foot,” said a dimwitted and shortsighted university president named Michael S. Roth.

And remember those benignly named Confucius Institutes — the ones that popped up on college campuses all across the nation and served to spread Chinese Communist propaganda while facilitating the massive theft of American intellectual property? They not only infected our universities, but their variants were also infecting some of our K-12 schools. Congress took action against them during the first Trump administration, and most — but not all — of them have since been shuttered. In addition, House Republicans recently passed legislation that restricts federal funding to universities that still harbor them.

By the way, Marco Rubio is proving to be an inspired pick as secretary of state. He’s smart, he’s tough, and he’s long understood that China is our nation’s foremost geopolitical foe. And those who think Donald Trump can’t tolerate dissenting views within his administration had better think again. Unlike his boss, Rubio has long sought a ban on the mind-rotting ChiCom spyware app known as TikTok.

In addition, back in 2018, while Democrats and dullard globalist Republicans were extolling the virtues of our burgeoning cultural “exchange” with China, Rubio was calling out those same Confucius Institutes as propaganda mills: “Their goal,” he said, “is to exploit America’s academic freedom to instill in the minds of future leaders a pro-China viewpoint. It’s smart. It’s a long-term, patient approach.”

Rubio, who has seen what the Castro regime did to his ancestral home of Cuba, knows a thing or two about the threat of communism.

As for revoking these student visas, we wonder whether Qatar — “free” jumbo jet notwithstanding — will now be on notice, given how it foments anti-Semitism on American campuses.