‘Prime Target’: Stanford Students Expose China’s Malign Influence in Academia

Chinese authorities are strategically placing students at Stanford University and requiring them to report on academic research, student journalists said Tuesday at a Heritage Foundation panel discussion of foreign influence in academia.

The revelation came from an investigation that began when a man, claiming to be a Stanford student, contacted China researchers last summer. Stanford student journalist Elsa Johnson was among those contacted, and with fellow student Garret Molloy, she exposed Chinese Communist Party influence at Stanford in a May bombshell investigative report.

Johnson recalled the suspicious messages. “He was also asking me to come to China without a visa in order to not alert U.S. authorities. He was saying I should go for one to six days and then go to Japan in between. It was so bizarre.”

“I ended up getting in touch with the FBI afterwards, and I was awakened to the fact that this actually happens a lot at Stanford,” Johnson added.

As China accelerates its sophistication in high tech, “Stanford is a prime target” owing to its proximity to California’s Silicon Valley, Molloy said. He added that after conducting interviews with Stanford students and professors, he and Johnson discovered Chinese authorities selected and directed people into specific areas of research.

The process, Molloy explained, involves the Chinese government using scholarships to send students to Stanford.

The students are then required to report on research under China’s 2017 national intelligence law. Intimidation and “loyalty pledges” to the Chinese Communist Party through the Chinese Scholarship Council motivate Chinese nationals studying abroad to report their findings, Molloy said.

Concerns of foreign infiltration at American colleges extend beyond Stanford, said Paul Moore, chief investigative counsel and assistant general counsel at the Education Department, during an ensuing panel discussion. In July, Moore opened an investigation into the University of Michigan after the arrest of two Chinese nationals for smuggling biological materials into the U.S.

“The Chinese know which research universities these are. They target these research universities,” Moore said.

Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, clarified during the discussion that “the vast majority of international students in the U.S. today are good students. But when you have 1.1 million [international students], the tail of distribution gets pretty big and gets dangerous.”

Improved vetting of foreign students should be welcomed, said Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

“We want to make sure that they are real students, that they’re coming here to get an education and not to be full-time activists or do things that are against the interest of American citizens,” Hankinson added.

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