Experts warn China uses students to steal U.S. research

There are about 277,000 Chinese students studying at American colleges and universities, and up to 18% of them—nearly 50,000—are funded by a program suspected of espionage.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent letters to seven colleges and universities earlier this month, urging them to cut ties with the China Scholarship Council (CSC), a study abroad program funded by China. Some of the schools said they had already moved toward ending the program, while others are weighing the request.

The letter called the CSC a “nefarious mechanism” and a threat to national security, saying it is actively stealing technology and research for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“CSC purports to be a joint scholarship program between U.S. and Chinese institutions,” wrote Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., the committee chair. “In reality, it is a CCP-managed technology transfer effort that exploits U.S. institutions and directly supports China’s military and scientific growth.”

Moolenaar set a deadline of July 22 for school leaders to provide the committee with extensive documentation on their university’s collaboration with the CSC from 2020-2025, but he did not say what the consequences will be for schools that do not comply.

Moolenaar noted that U.S. universities rely on “significant federal funding” for their research and asked for school officials to justify how supporting these students advances U.S. interests.

In response, Dartmouth College said it ended its program last school year, and University of Notre Dame said it did the same earlier this year. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, announced it had severed its relationship with the program shortly after receiving the letter.

A spokesperson from Temple University told WORLD that the school is “reviewing the requests and guidance in the letter and will respond by the requested deadline.” WORLD reached out to the school the day of the deadline but did not receive a response.

It’s unclear if the remaining schools—University of California’s Davis, Irvine, and Riverside campuses—have followed the committee’s letter. They did not respond to WORLD’s request for comment prior to publication.

The CSC was founded in 1996 as a nonprofit under China’s Ministry of Education, according to its website. It primarily supports Chinese students interested in undergraduate and graduate programs overseas, but it also provides scholarships for foreign students studying in China.

Around 7-18% of Chinese students in the United States receive funding from the CSC, according to a 2020 study from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. In the 2023-24 academic year, approximately 277,000 Chinese students studied in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education.

Under the CSC, Chinese students who graduate from their overseas programs are required to return to China and work there for at least two years, Moolenaar said. “CSC has faced increasing scrutiny and criticism due to concerns over academic freedom, surveillance of students, ideological control, and potential espionage,” he wrote.

According to Moolenaar’s letters to the schools, Dartmouth has up to 15 Ph.D. students in its CSC program, Temple up to 60 graduate students, and Notre Dame up to 40 Ph.D. students.

The CSC could be a means for Chinese students to infiltrate higher education in other countries, said Jack Burnham, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Similar reports have popped up in other countries, like Australia, Canada, and Switzerland.

“[There is] concern that students that receive these funds will then be used by the Chinese state to advance China’s overall political ambitions,” Burnham said, “particularly for the purposes of stealing intellectual property, and that might advance China’s industrial might and military prowess.”

That risk can be higher in STEM programs, something Moolenaar noted in his letter, Burnham said. While the vast majority of Chinese students in the United States aren’t stealing secrets, Burnham explained that CSC students face a lot of pressure to share tech information they learned overseas with either their government or Chinese companies.

CSC students are required to adhere to their country’s political ideology, Burnham said. He shared a translated screenshot of the program’s application requirements for students that read: “Support the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, love the motherland.”

Students outside of the CSC can feel this pressure, too, Burnham added.

Last year, the House Select Committee on the CCP issued a report stating that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding had gone toward research that ended up advancing Chinese technology. A large portion of this funding occurred through academic partnerships, the report found.

“Cutting [CSC] is a way of cutting off the flow of Chinese students into the United States,” Burnham said. “[That] has, certainly, an impact on Chinese ability to potentially conduct this type of espionage or intellectual property theft within American universities.”

Burnham said that other countries are watching with “interest” how the United States interacts with the CSC. Several universities in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have already cut ties with the scholarship program.

The issue with the CSC is a “subset of a bigger problem that we've known about for a while,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow of foreign policy at the Hudson Institute. China will use its students, either through the CSC or other programs, to learn research to gain a technological advantage.

Universities have partnered with the CSC and similar Chinese programs because of the money foreign students bring in, Sobolik said. But these partnerships might not be worth the potential “hurt” on national security, he argued.

“It’s part of China’s broader effort to get a hold of U.S. innovation,” Sobolik said. “America has an edge for innovation and for next generation technologies, and China wants to steal it from us and to use it before we can.”