A government accountability watchdog says in its March 2025 report, released Friday, that most of America’s elite universities have been accepting large dole-outs from foreign entities, including from China.
The
report by Americans for Public Trust (APT) says that in 2024 alone, entities based in China poured $176.6 million into the U.S. tertiary education system, although the annual figure is only a fraction of the $60 billion in gifts and contracts coming from “long-standing adversaries” in “past decades.”
The report follows a March 18
letter from the Select House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to
six of America’s top universities asking for information on Chinese nationals enrolled in their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricula.
APT noted that in 2024, China contributed $176.6 million to schools in the United States, and singled out the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) as a recipient of a particularly large amount of capital from communist China.
The report—citing a January 2024 Fox News
article and
another by the Washington Free Beacon in February this year, along with the Foreign Gift and Contract Data made
public by the Department of Education (DOE) in June 2024—estimated that UPenn received $130 million from China over approximately five years.
The Epoch Times has reached out to UPenn for comment.
Crimes of Espionage
The watchdog further notes that these dole-outs led to an increase in illegal U.S.-China collaborations involving Chinese economic and intellectual espionage, and the ensuing arrests of U.S.-based researchers.According to the APT, this trend is “alarming evidence of the level of influence gifts and contracts have bought Beijing” at some of America’s “premiere universities and research institutions.”
It goes on to cite a June 2020 Department of Justice (DOJ)
news release on the indictment of a Harvard University Professor following his false statements to federal authorities regarding his affiliation with China’s Thousand Talents Program—dubbed by the DOJ as the “most prominent Chinese talent recruitment plans designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security.”
The 61-year-old Dr. Charles Lieber was Harvard’s Principal Investigator of the Lieber Research group, which started in 2008. The program, which focussed on nanoscience, received research grants worth more than $15 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense.
Unbeknownst to Harvard University, Lieber had joined China’s Wuhan University of Technology as a “strategic scientist” in 2011. A follow-up
report by the DOJ in April 2023 noted that he was sentenced to “time served (two days) in prison; two years of supervised release with six months of home confinement; a fine of $50,000; and $33,600 in restitution to the IRS.”
APT noted that Leiber’s criminal case was one of 20 involving China filed by the DOJ.
It names China’s Confucius Institutes program, which purportedly promotes the Chinese language and culture, as a front for advancing the Chinese regime’s soft power.
According to the APT, the program is a means of disseminating “Communist China’s worldviews” and a distraction from the security and economic menace the CCP poses to the West.
Many of these programs were shut down after they came under the spotlight for indoctrination and spreading propaganda, but a few of them still exist under the same name, while others, it is feared, are relaunching under different branding.
Young Minds and Foreign Influence
The ATP said that China is one in a string of sovereignties funneling capital into America’s educational institutions.It notes that while China
for many years was the largest source of foreign funding to U.S. universities, Qatar is now beating China, with its 2024 expenditure reaching a high of $342.8 million. It added that Harvard and Cornell Universities—among the institutes that received the most Qatari money—both saw a sharp uptick in Anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric since Hamas’s 2023 invasion of Israel.
Qatar has come under criticism for providing financial aid to Iran-backed Hamas and hosting some of their leadership, which has seen them evade international sanctions. Qatar says its support is aimed at the people of Gaza.
Third on the list was Saudi Arabia, with $175.3 million, followed by Hong Kong in its capacity as a special administrative region of China, with $81.7 million.
Bahrain, having spent $4.08 million, was sixth on APT’s top ten foreign spenders list in 2024, followed by Lebanon, which spent $1 million, and Iraq with $230,000.
The last two were Azerbaijan and Russia, which spent $56,500 and $19,093 respectively.
The APT goes on to say that while Congress requires universities and colleges to report gifts or contracts amounting to $250,000 or more bi-annually—
in line with the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA)–there have been “colossal deficiencies in schools’ compliance with the law, as well as with enforcement for those institutions that break it.”
It cites a 2020 DOE institutional compliance
report, which stated that “large and well-resourced institutions of higher education have aggressively pursued and accepted foreign money while failing to comply with Section 117 of the HEA.”
The DOE found that only 300 out of 6,000 institutions reported as required, but of that number, many “did so inadequately.” These infractions led to the discovery of “$6.5 billion in previously unreported funds.”
A 2019 Senate
Staff Report, “China’s Impact on the U.S. Education System,” echoed the DOE’s findings.
“Foreign government spending on U.S. schools is effectively a black hole, as there is a lack of reporting detailing the various sources of foreign government funding,” it read.
According to APT, the
peril of this noncompliance is that it risks theft of intellectual property and corporate espionage, along with threats of influence by the CCP and international terrorist groups.
As a nod to this statement, the APT report observes that the countries topping the “foreign funders of U.S. colleges and universities” list are “long standing adversaries” of America.
According to the report, the gifts and contracts from China, Russia, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, and Qatar cumulatively amount to $500 million.
