A United States senator has lashed out at Chinese students studying in America, accusing them of stealing intellectual property.

He says the government needs to take a hard look at visas issued to students from China attending U.S. universities.

The senator has also lashed out at the Chinese government, accusing it of incompetence and negligence in its handling of the coronavirus.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was appearing on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News.

“If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America,” Cotton said. “They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.

Speaking on the channel that first reported the possibility that the coronavirus may have originated in a lab, Senator Cotton was in full flight.

“It was pretty well documented by Chinese scientists that it did not originate in the food market,” he said Sunday. “But wherever it originated, we know that the Chinese Communist Party was both criminally negligent and incompetent at first and then deliberately, deliberately malevolent in the way they responded to this virus for their own people and the world as early as the second week of December.”

“I believe that was a deliberate and conscious choice by the Chinese communist leadership because they did not want to see their relative power and standing in the world decline because this virus was contained within China. If we’re going to suffer an economic contraction, they were not going to allow the world to continue to prosper and China be the only country whose economy was declining. They might see an absolute decline in their economy, but they refuse to see a relative decline, especially relative to the United States,” Cotton added.

Cotton didn’t leave it there.

“I think most Americans are shocked to learn that so many of our basic drugs are made in China,” he said. “We need to stop that. We need to bring it back to the United States and get it out of China so we would give incentives to companies to build new plants here, create more jobs here. So we’re not dependent on China in a pandemic or even in any kind of health concerns.

“Second, China is continuing even now to take aggressive action throughout the region to break its commitments, it’s cracking down on Hong Kong and violations of its commitments to Great Britain when Great Britain returned Hong Kong,” the U.S. senator said.

“It’s taking aggressive action in the South China Sea. We need to invest more in our defense industrial base to offset some of the losses we’re gonna see because of this virus. We need more ships. We need more submarines. We need more bombers. We need more fighters. The exact kind of systems that will deter China from aggressive action against the United States and our interests in the Western Pacific and ultimately all around the globe.”