Report Says Missouri State Trained China’s Defense Executives Allegedly With Taxpayer Support

The university denied U.S. taxpayer dollars were directed toward the program, while Missouri’s governor and the House China panel chairman raised concerns.

The stand for the Aviation Industry Corporation of China at the Paris Air Show on June 21, 2025. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch Times

A new Strategy Risks report alleges that Missouri State University has trained Chinese defense-linked executives, government officials, and state-owned enterprise personnel through China-focused MBA and EMBA programs for more than two decades, with U.S. taxpayer support.

The report, titled “Heartland for Hire,” says the Missouri public university operated a pipeline that had trained more than 1,500 current and future managers for Chinese state-owned enterprises and government bodies by 2018.

Strategy Risks said some graduates went on to senior roles in China’s defense industry, strategic supply chains, and surveillance-technology sector, including at the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, known as AVIC.

The taxpayer-support claim is disputed. Strategy Risks based its estimate on Chinese recruiting materials and Missouri State records, not on public U.S. records confirming taxpayer payments. The report says no public U.S. record confirms that taxpayer money was paid.

Missouri State denied in its statement to The Epoch Times that taxpayer dollars were directed toward the program.

The university also said the report acknowledges that students studied a “conventional business curriculum” and that there was “no evidence of espionage, intellectual property theft, misconduct, false affiliations, or complaints of harassment.”

“Students admitted to the program were required to comply with all student visa regulations administered by the U.S. State Department,” the university said.

Officials Raise Concerns

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s office said it is reviewing the report.

“China is one of our nation’s most hostile and subtle adversaries,” Gabby Picard, the governor’s communications director, told The Epoch Times.

Picard said Kehoe does not support policies that aid the Chinese Communist Party in “stealing intellectual property, enhancing their national defense, disadvantaging Missouri businesses, providing intelligence on U.S. or Missouri government operations, or any other matter that provides strategic or tactical advantages, including in the public higher education system.”

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said Missouri State’s program fits a broader pattern of Beijing using U.S. academic access for strategic gain.

“Missouri State’s program is another example of how China is exploiting our nation’s open society and using our academic institutions to advance its military modernization,” Moolenaar said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

“University administrators across the country must be vigilant and only engage in open and honest educational exchanges that teach all students about the horrors of the CCP’s actions and ambitions, rather than aiding and abetting our nation’s biggest strategic competitor,” he said.

The Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development referred questions to Missouri State University.

Tracking Defense-Linked Graduates

Strategy Risks said its investigation combined English- and Chinese-language records, including Chinese government recruitment notices, industry association circulars, consular records, securities disclosures, corporate biographies, and Missouri State board records.

Sam Shulman of Strategy Risks told The Epoch Times that the group relied on Chinese corporate records, biographies, and other open-source research to identify participants’ government, state-owned-enterprise, defense-industry, and surveillance-sector ties.

For participants linked to AVIC and other defense-related entities, Shulman said Strategy Risks determined that those affiliations existed “before, during, and after enrollment.”

AVIC is China’s largest state-owned aviation and defense conglomerate. The U.S. government has placed AVIC on lists restricting or flagging Chinese military-linked companies. The Defense Department has identified AVIC as a Chinese military company, and the Treasury Department has listed it on the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List.

Strategy Risks says Missouri State enrolled active AVIC employees in full-time MBA training in December 2019 and arranged a meeting between those trainees and a delegation from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or NUAA.

NUAA is one of China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a group of universities integrated into China’s defense research system, according to the report. The Commerce Department placed NUAA on its Entity List in December 2020, citing national security concerns.

The report names several graduates whose Missouri State credentials and defense-sector roles were identified through securities filings, corporate disclosures, official biographies, or other public records.

They include an executive at AVIC International Finance Leasing, a former chief accountant at AVIC’s drone-manufacturing subsidiary, and an executive linked to AVIC Heavy Machinery.

The report also cites a Missouri State MBA graduate who served as director and vice president of iFLYTEK, a Chinese artificial intelligence and voice-recognition company. The Commerce Department added iFLYTEK to the Entity List in 2019 over its role in surveillance technology used against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

Report Says Chinese State Institutions Controlled Admissions

The report says the China program began after a 1999 visit to the United States by China’s State Economic and Trade Commission, then a cabinet-level agency overseeing large state-owned enterprises.

Two programs were selected, one at Missouri State and one at Wright State University in Ohio, and both officially launched in 2001, according to Strategy Risks.

Chinese-language government documents later described the program as a “China-U.S. state-to-state cooperation project,” the report says.

Strategy Risks said Chinese state and party institutions—not Missouri State—controlled who was admitted, the selection criteria, and the makeup of each cohort.

The report says recruiting documents from Sichuan and Shandong required political reliability, including formal CCP membership in one early notice and “a high level of ideological and political consciousness” in a 2018 notice.

Missouri State’s own 2011 president’s blog post described the university’s China Programs as beginning in 1998 and said the EMBA program began in 2007. The post said the one-year, 33-credit EMBA program was designed for students sponsored by Chinese professional associations, provincial and municipal government agencies, and universities.

The same post said 10 EMBA cohorts totaling 370 students had enrolled since 2007 and that the program generated revenue for the university.

The Funding Dispute

Strategy Risks said Chinese recruiting materials gave conflicting accounts of the program’s finances.

The report cited one 2014 Chinese recruiting source that described a funding split in which the Chinese government covered half the cost, the U.S. government covered one-quarter, and students paid the remaining quarter.

That source implied roughly $27,000 in U.S. taxpayer support per student, according to Strategy Risks. The report estimates that U.S. taxpayer support “was significant and may have reached tens of millions of dollars.”

Shulman said the estimate was not based on records from Missouri State itself.

The report also says other recruiting materials describe the funding differently, and that “no public U.S. record confirms that taxpayer money was paid, so no total can be confirmed.”

Missouri State rejected the taxpayer-funding claim.

“We are aware of the report released by Strategy Risks regarding Missouri State University. No taxpayer dollars were directed toward the program, as the report alleges but readily admits it cannot substantiate,” the university said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

Strategy Risks also cited Missouri State board records showing that the university requested more than $18 million from IMEC, an intermediary that “appears to have channeled Chinese-side program funds to MSU,” from fiscal years 2007 through 2020. The report says public records do not clearly establish who controlled IMEC or how it related to Chinese state institutions.

Program Status Remains Unclear

Strategy Risks said Missouri State’s China-related infrastructure remained active in recent years.

The report cites a China Programs Specialist job description, revised in January 2025, that said the position depended on sufficient revenue from the EMBA program and included responsibilities for developing and expanding EMBA partnerships with Chinese sponsors.

The report also cites Chinese university websites advertising Missouri State MBA programs for a 2024 intake and says the university’s partnership with Liaoning Normal University in Dalian remained in operation.

Missouri State did not directly answer The Epoch Times’ questions about whether the China-focused EMBA or MBA program, or any successor program, remains active.

The university said students admitted to the program were required to comply with State Department student visa rules.