The student journalists at Stanford University have published an investigation “Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford” (May 7, 2025). They report that “the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford. In short, there are Chinese spies at Stanford….
“For years, concerns about Chinese espionage have quietly persisted at Stanford. Throughout our investigation, professors, students, and researchers readily recounted their experiences of Chinese spying, yet they declined to speak publicly.”
Students face transnational repression and threats to family at home. Professors face retribution for endangering donations—for instance, the $64 million at stake in Chinese funding from 2010 to 2021. There is a connection between communist donations and the license given to Beijing’s intelligence services.
Hiding donations, donors
The student journalists report:
Only a small percentage of these donations have been publicly reported to the Department of Education, despite a requirement under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act which requires universities to report all foreign gifts with a value above $250,000.
China’s theft of intellectual property from the higher education system is unmatched in both scale and sophistication. Through the Thousand Talents Program, China has provided grants, research funding, and other financial incentives to American faculty working on science and engineering research projects. In return, knowledge gained from these initiatives is transmitted back to China.
Not only do universities under-report the donations, they also hide the donors, donors well worth knowing.
Example: “The China-United States Exchange Foundation, founded by Chinese billionaire megadonor Tung Chee-hwa, helped fund Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies…. Chee-hwa occupies a powerful position on one of the CCP’s most important committees.” That position would be vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which he held from 2005 to 2023.
Donations undoubtedly encourage university to look favorably on the presence of Chinese students. But those students are required by law to spy for Red China:
A China expert familiar with Stanford, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that of the approximately 1,129 Chinese international students on campus, a select number are actively reporting to the Chinese Communist Party. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law mandates that all Chinese citizens support and cooperate with state intelligence work regardless of location.
Article 7 of this law enforces compliance: “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work from becoming known to the public.” These laws leave Chinese students no option but to accept the demands of the CCP. Students engaged in sensitive scientific research, especially in fields like AI and robotics, are those most often targeted.
Through its students, the communists compromise universities from the bottom up. But they also corrupt them from the top down through gifts and grants.
In 2022, The College Fix reported that China-based interests “contributed over $168 million to 46 American colleges and universities during a six-month period in 2021…. The Department of Education Foreign Gift Reporting database lists over 200 donations from China to U.S. institutions of higher education from January 1 to July 1. The donations were made in the form of contracts, gifts and restricted gifts.”
CCP earmarks
Restricted gifts are gifts that specify how the funds are to be used. Such gifts raise questions: “What if your professors weren’t chosen by your college? What if the courses you’re taking weren’t conceived by the faculty? What if the research you’re involved in isn’t driven by the pursuit of truth? At colleges nationwide, wealthy donors [and Beijing] are influencing who teaches, what is taught, and what new knowledge is developed and shared with the world.”
Note, for example, that the University of Pennsylvania says that in 2022 nearly half of donations were restricted.
We have as little insight into specific restrictions as we do into donor identities. Small wonder when “the higher-ed lobby has made it no secret that it opposes true transparency. The American Council on Education—the lobbying organization for colleges and universities—praised the Biden administration in an open letter for ending the investigations we launched into schools that were skirting the law and failing to report sources of foreign money.”
Speaking of Biden, the University of Pennsylvania “raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records. Most of the anonymous donations came after the university announced in February 2017 that it would create the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.”
Newsweek commented, incredibly, “One of the implications here is that Chinese donors may have been trying to influence the Bidens in some manner.”
According to a text message found on “Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop…CEFC China Energy Co, one of the firms that Hunter Biden had a financial stake in, wanted to lobby politicians in the US but did not want to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), as required for all foreign lobbyists.”
Here’s a FARA-free lobbying hack!
Penn denied that communist money went into creation of the center. But the U.S. Congress noticed something else, that the Penn Biden Center “appears to have acted as a foreign-sponsored source of income for much of a Biden Administration in-waiting…. Between 2017 and 2019, UPenn paid President Biden more than $900,000, and the university employed at least 10 people at the Penn Biden Center who later became senior Biden administration officials.”
One of the ten people was Antony Blinken, hired at a salary of $1 million per year. The Biden Center became a kind of pass-through for communist money.
Someone please tell Newsweek that Red China “influenced the Bidens in some manner.”
Tell everybody
As long as money trumps integrity, universities will continue to ignore reporting laws. The mainland students studying here will remain prisoners of the communist security services. And anti-communist, pro-Tibetan or pro-Uyghur views will never get much of a hearing—if they are permitted on campus at all.
Some good news: GOP Congresswoman Michelle Steel has drafted a law lowering the college reporting requirements for foreign donations from $250,000 and up to $50,000 and up. It passed last year.
This information should not only be reported, it should be publicized.
The universities’ finances are infected and need a lot of sunlight. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
