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WASHINGTON, D.C. — “They’re afraid for their families. In many ways, they can’t even think freely, even in a free country,” Stanford University’s Elsa Johnson said of Chinese students who study there.
On Tuesday, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation held an event called “How to Stop ‘Academic Espionage’ on Campus” with Johnson (pictured center) and Garret Molloy (pictured left).
Both student journalists, their May 7 article in The Stanford Review revealed evidence of espionage by the Chinese Communist Party at their university.
“Drawing on anonymous testimony from faculty, students, and China specialists, our investigation confirms that the CCP runs an extensive intelligence‑gathering network at Stanford,” they wrote.
The investigation was sparked last summer when a student impersonator going by “Charles Chen” approached Johnson on Instagram. “He was…asking me to come to China without a VISA in order not to alert U.S. authorities,” Johnson said at the event Tuesday, adding, “It was so bizarre.”
After sharing what happened with the FBI, Johnson said she discovered her experience was not uncommon.
Molloy shared his concerns about the CCP’s presence on campus, saying, “One of the issues…is that Stanford is an open knowledge institution.”
Johnson added, “This was particularly concerning to us because we’re in Silicon Valley and…we’re at the frontier of technology.”
However, she said little happened as a result of their investigation.
Stanford responded in a statement soon after the article came out, stating that it was “looking into the reports in the Stanford Review article, and have reached out to federal law enforcement to consult on appropriate actions.”
Several scholars with Stanford’s Hoover Institution also addressed the investigation in a May 9 letter to the editor.
Johnson said the university promised to investigate, “but it clearly isn’t important to them because this has been going on at Stanford and other universities for so long and nothing has been done about it.”
China coerces students to conduct espionage: investigation
The scope of the espionage is concerning, Johnson said. “There is a 2017 national security law in China that requires any information if requested. Stanford alone has over 1,100 Chinese national students studying abroad at Stanford.”
As a result, “the Chinese government can collect the information from over a thousand students on what they’re researching — many of whom are working in AI labs or robotics or doing something tech related,” she said. They “use their own students as spies…and they don’t need to be trained.”
In other cases, Molloy said, “their parents are threatened when they [say] they are not going to turn over this research.”
He said the espionage, whether coerced or voluntary, aims to advance China’s economy “past basic manufacturing and the high tech sectors that America and Silicon Valley dominates.”
Johnson said about 15 percent of Chinese students studying in the U.S. receive funding from the China Scholarship Council, which is “one of the methods that the CCP can use to collect information from students.”
“If students are asked to join the CSC and get a scholarship, then they have to sign loyalty pledges to the party that they will act [on] the party’s behalf when they study abroad,” Molloy said.
As a result of their investigation, Johnson said she and Molloy have been labeled “racists” for “targeting Chinese people.”
“That could not be further from the truth,” she said, adding that she grew up at a Chinese immersion school and researched China last summer at the Hoover Institution.
Rather, Johnson said she is worried for Chinese nationals. “They come here to study and they don’t have any freedom to study what they want.”
“We want to have their experience improved. We want them to be able to work on the research projects they love. We want them to do so without fear of transnational oppression, intimidation, and being forced to turn over their research,” Molloy said.
“We want them to integrate into American society and that involves protecting them,” he said. “Calling people racists who want to stop the intimidation of these people is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.”
Scholars: Academic espionage is a problem across U.S.
Event host Jonathan Butcher, acting director at the Center for Education Policy at Heritage, announced that more research is on its way from the Stanford students before introducing a second panel of speakers.
He prefaced the discussion by defining espionage as “not just stealing…it’s stirring up protests and…fomenting unrest.”
Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, said the U.S. has about 1.1 million international students on its campuses — and for “the Ivy League it’s a third of total enrollment.”
“Part of the problem is that universities used to be partners with the government in helping screen who it is that they were bringing in and universities have abdicated that responsibility,” Greene said.
Unfortunately, “1 million is too many for the federal government to review carefully,” he said.
Paul Moore, assistant general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education, said the amount of funding that backs these universities also is important to consider.
“The American people put about $55 billion a year behind our research at our main research universities in this country,” Moore said.
Greene also raised concerns about the abundance of protests at elite universities.
While “the average international student is not involved, … when you let in very large numbers then within that very large number is going to be a critical mass of people who are agitators,” he said.
He brought up the example of Mohsen Mahdawi, “who has been an undergraduate for 17 years.” Mahdawi is a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was arrested by immigration officials after leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Simon Hankinson, a former State Department officer and current research fellow at Heritage, said Mahdawi has “done nothing constructive for this country” and his pro-Palestinian activism “ruined the school year for a number of students, Jewish students in particular.”
“So I would argue that legally and ethically, he is a deportable alien who we do not need,” Hankinson said.
He also referenced Columbia’s “reputation” and the pro-Palestinian group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, “where those rioters took over the library right before exams” and “damaged the building.”
Meanwhile, Greene recalled the story of Charles Lieber, the former head of the chemistry and chemical biology department at Harvard University.
Lieber received two days in prison, six months house arrest, and a fine for hiding Chinese government affiliations, and quietly retired from Harvard in 2023, as The College Fix previously reported.
“They would pay him for his position at the Wuhan Institute of Technology in cash in $100 bills in paper bags,” Greene said.
Trump admin is ‘trying to vet students better’
Regarding the recent deportations, Hankinson said, “Anyone who is an alien, meaning not a U.S. citizen, is subject to … deportability criterion.”
“If you are a member of the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, if you have committed a serious crime, if you have a contagious disease, there’s a whole list of disqualifications, and one of them is if you endorse or espouse terrorism…But this shouldn’t be controversial,” Hankinson said.
He continued, “You don’t get to come to the United States because you want to, you get to come because we allow you. We’re very generous about that. Over a million students here, 50 million people coming in and out of this country every year.”
Regarding recent policies, he said, “They’ve revoked, I believe somewhere around 2,000 student VISAs. That’s a drop in the bucket and those are for people who broke the rules.”
“So when we are trying to vet students better than we have done so far, people should be happy about that because we want to make sure that they are real students, that they’re coming here to get an education and not be full time activists or … do things that are against interests of American citizens,” he said.
Hankinson pushed back on claims that the government is impinging on free expression or free speech, and urged people to remember the pro-Palestinian encampments where students were harassed and prevented from going to class.
As for why the government and schools go to the trouble of accepting international students, Greene said the International Exchange Programs were created to “export American values.”
“The idea was that we bring in talented and elite people from around the world [and] they would have an exposure to the American political system, learn its virtues, and bring those values home,” he said.
Now, the ratio of American to international students is much closer, meaning some are now “going into the government, into industry, having been indoctrinated by international values, by other people’s values, and then also being softened up for sharing information with these other governments,” Greene said.
“We shouldn’t be shocked that others are trying to steal and sabotage. We should just be shocked that we don’t care enough to try to stop it, including our leading universities that seem to be assisting them,” he said.
Considering Johnson’s and Molloy’s work, Moore said, “It shouldn’t take a couple of students with some nerve to stand up and do this, report these kinds of things.”
MORE: Harvard professor convicted for hiding ties to China gets new job in China
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Stanford University students Elsa Johnson, center, and Garret Molloy, right, speak at the Heritage Foundation about their investigation into espionage by the Chinese Communist Party; Heritage Foundation
