In the hours after the Trump administration announced that it would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, the line to apply for new visas at the US embassy in Beijing still stretched down the block on Thursday.

But for many of the hopefuls — including some who walked out of the embassy with their visa applications approved — any celebration was laced with a mix of anxiety and helplessness.

“What now? Something new every day?” said Li Kunze, 18, who had just successfully applied for a visa to study as an undergraduate. He had not heard the news until he left the embassy. “I don’t even know if they can give me this visa that I just got.”

He sighed. Since it was too late to apply elsewhere for his undergraduate years, “I can only brace myself,” said Li, who plans to study applied mathematics. But, “in the future, if I can avoid going to the US to study, I will. They make people too scared”.

The scene outside the embassy captured the complicated feelings many Chinese students have towards studying in the US. Hundreds of thousands still go each year, lured by the promise of a world-class education. Some also have deep admiration for America’s professed values of openness and diversity.

But they must reckon with the fact — made clearer by the Trump administration every day — that many in the US may not share that admiration.

Even before the announcement by secretary of state Marco Rubio that the US would begin revoking student visas, Chinese students and their families were uncertain about their prospects for studying in America. Two days earlier, Rubio had ordered a pause on new interviews for student and exchange visas.

Chinese students have been singled out before. In 2020, during his first term, President Trump issued a proclamation banning students from certain Chinese universities from graduate study in the US, alleging that those universities had ties to China’s military. The parameters of that proclamation, which is still in effect, were vague, but it has been used mostly to deny visas to people in fields such as the physical sciences, engineering and computer science, according to researchers.

But the effect of the earlier measure was relatively limited, resulting in the revocations or denials of about 3,000 visas between 2020 and 2021, according to US government data. It is unclear what the scope of the new revocations will be, but they are likely to be much more far-reaching. Rubio’s order said only that they would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party” or “studying in critical fields”.

As Chinese students were digesting the announcement, the response from Chinese officials was relatively muted. A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said that the US was “using ideology and national security as an excuse” to harm Chinese students.