Every year, China’s elite send their children to the United States to attend university. America’s publicly supported institutions then provide those Chinese students with high-level technical skills — skills those international students sometimes take home to serve corporations working to actualize the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda.
This plays out each academic cycle, to little fanfare.
A Washington Examiner review of social media profiles identified dozens of individuals working at Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent, three conglomerates with deep ties to the Chinese government, who were educated at elite American universities. The full number of staff at pro-CCP corporations who received their education in the United States is almost certainly much larger, as the Washington Examiner’s analysis only covered a small sample of the millions of Chinese international students who return home to work after receiving an education in the West.
The review of social media profiles included Chinese graduates of the top 20 universities in the United States, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, as well as alumni from a handful of other institutions with strong computer science departments, such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois.
“Hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals study in the United States, with some gaining access to cutting-edge research in fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors, and aerospace engineering … Some of these students are directly linked to Chinese state-backed funding sources, government talent recruitment programs, and research institutions tied to China’s military-industrial complex,” House Select Committee on the CCP Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) wrote in a letter to a slew of university presidents on March 19. “This pattern raises significant concerns about the extent to which Chinese nationals, after gaining expertise in highly advanced fields, ultimately transfer knowledge back to China.”
Tencent, which the Department of Defense recently designated as an arm of the Chinese military, employs hundreds of graduates from elite American universities. The U.S.-educated employees have taken on roles as software engineers, project managers, researchers, data analysts, human resources professionals, and even senior management at the CCP-linked technology conglomerate.
As these Chinese graduates put their U.S. taxpayer-subsidized education to use, Tencent is actively working to advance the CCP’s interests. In February 2023, the Chinese government moved to acquire “golden shares” in Tencent — relatively small ownership stakes that, by Chinese law, grant the CCP control over key business decisions made by the firm.
Tencent co-founder and CEO Ma Huateng is a member of the CCP who served two terms as part of China’s National People’s Congress, further cementing Tencent’s apparent allegiance to Beijing. Evidencing Tencent’s alignment with the CCP, the conglomerate reportedly collaborated with the Chinese government to censor dissident viewpoints and plays a prominent role in the Belt and Road Initiative — a global infrastructure project run by the CCP that some experts argue is a vector for Chinese influence in the developing world.
Alibaba and Huawei, which the Washington Examiner found has dozens of engineers and analysts educated at top American universities, are also major partners in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Huawei, in particular, has been crucial in executing China’s strategy, constructing telecommunications and internet infrastructure across the developing world. Some China hawks argue that, in addition to deepening China’s economic ties with the developing world, Huawei’s infrastructure also expands the CCP’s ability to conduct espionage due to laws that allow the Chinese government to access its user data. Several Western nations have banned Huawei hardware over these concerns, and the United States has designated it as an arm of the Chinese military.
Alibaba, for its part, has contributed to the initiative through targeted investments and efforts to expand China’s e-commerce footprint. The Chinese government has also acquired “golden shares” in Alibaba, as it did with Tencent. In 2019, Reuters reported that the e-commerce giant had developed an app that promoted Chinese propaganda in the form of government-approved news and information about the CCP’s ideology.
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Harvard University, which educated numerous employees at the trio of pro-CCP firms, has provided public health training to hundreds of Chinese government officials, including some working for agencies sanctioned over their links to the Uyghur genocide, the Washington Free Beacon reported. China is one of the largest foreign funders of American higher education, with entities from the country having donated $5.6 billion to U.S. institutions between 2014 and 2024, according to an analysis conducted by the Free Press.
According to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. colleges make a significant amount of money educating Chinese international students, raking in an estimated $12 billion per year via tuition payments.
American policymakers have long been critical of China’s relationship with higher education institutions, typically raising points about intellectual property theft and influence on curricula. On March 14, for instance, a group of House Republicans led by Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) introduced legislation that would bar Chinese students from studying in the United States on the grounds that they “spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security.”
President Donald Trump recently stated that he believes the tax-exempt status enjoyed by American universities is “totally contingent on acting in the public interest.”