SPIES ON CAMPUS: The Chinese Have Invaded the Quad

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America’s secrets are in danger. Chinese students and professors, and some Americans who are simply willing to take Chinese money, are giving American secrets to the communist regime. They aren’t stealing these secrets in military facilities or corporate R&D labs, they’re stealing them on America’s campuses.

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently wrote an op-ed decrying Chinese efforts to steal American intellectual property. The Chinese, said the senator, steal $600 billion of intellectual property each year. He wrote:

There is a reason China repeatedly uses “science” as cover for its spying. It adds a superficial layer of legitimacy that is often accepted and perpetuated by America’s leaders and decision-makers. It helps China steal $600 billion per year of America’s intellectual property.

It isn’t just our airspace China is penetrating. American academic and scientific institutions are routinely weaponized by the PRC for its own military and economic benefit.

U.S. national labs develop state-of-the-art technology and conduct pioneering research funded by American taxpayers. Many of these scientific breakthroughs have military applications. Too often, China has a front-row seat to their creation.

A 2022 report by Strider Technologies revealed that from 1987 to 2021, the Chinese government successfully targeted at least 160 Chinese researchers working at Los Alamos, our top nuclear weapons lab. These scientists later returned to China to “advance key military and dual-use technologies in areas such as hypersonics, deep-earth penetrating warheads, unmanned aerial vehicles, jet engines, and submarine noise reduction.”

Every piece of this sensitive knowledge now in the hands of China was developed and paid for by Americans.

There are not adequate safeguards in our national labs to overcome the obvious risks to our national security. This is also the case with researchers from other hostile nations, such as Russia and Belarus.

If you know a college student, you may have heard stories from them of the odd behavior of their Chinese classmates. Anecdotal evidence suggests some don’t attend class, or even show up at their dorm rooms. They’re playing ping pong all day or gaming all night. Why are they on campus at all?

Many of these students are buying their way onto campus with falsified grades and unlimited sums of money for tuition payments. In a lengthy piece in the South China Morning Post, Xinrou Shu details the popular method of gaining access to American universities by falsifying records and bribing admissions officers at American schools. She tells the story of Zang, a typical Chinese student who bribed his way through the American university system, writing:

With good grades and a Zhejiang hukou, Zang would have a better chance of attending the province’s top institutions, such as Zhejiang University, but they thought studying abroad would be the icing on the cake, a wise investment to guarantee a well-paid job.

To the 15-year-old, studying abroad was a vague but exciting idea. He immediately agreed to it. The decision meant he now had to study for the TOEFL and SATs.

His parents hired a private-education consulting agency that wrote his personal statements based on a questionnaire in Chinese, which asked him to list his extracurricular activities and achievements. This was the only part of the application process in which he took part.

So it went: under the guise of application consulting, admissions fraud secured Zang a spot for a bachelor’s degree at a prestigious US university, and little did he know at the time, five years later, thanks to a post on WeChat, fraud would again earn him a shot at a master’s degree.

None of this is unusual in China. A former employee at New Oriental, China’s biggest education service company, told Reuters in 2016 that he “wrote essays and recommendation letters for students when I worked at New Oriental, which I still do now for my own consultancy. I know there is an ethical dilemma but it’s the nature of the industry.”

In 2012, Time Magazine’s Justin Bergman reported that Zinch China, a consultancy company used by U.S. colleges and universities estimated that “90% of recommendation letters from Chinese students are fake, 70% of college application essays are not written by the students, and half of all high school transcripts are falsified.”

If universities and colleges don’t know who the students attending their classes and performing their research really are, how can they manage to keep them from giving away the secrets of that research to the Communist Chinese government?

And it’s not just students. The Daily Wire+ has collated reports of many professors who have participated in espionage for China. Watch their video below.

It is imperative that America strengthen its oversight of foreign students on college campuses, and deter professors and others from collaborating with foreign powers by increasing punishments for such behavior.