The Chinese Communist Party is quietly expanding its reach into the heart of American civic and academic life, and far too many of our own institutions are helping it along.
Earlier this month, a startling revelation emerged that a Chinese Communist Party intelligence official had acquired a building overlooking the White House, underscoring how brazen Beijing has become in positioning itself close to the nerve center of American power. In the same time frame, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party released yet another investigative report detailing the CCPs deep and ongoing penetration of American higher education, as reported by Western Journal.
Almost simultaneously, the watchdog group Defending Education published a separate report exposing a CCP-funded initiative that sends American students on carefully curated exchange trips to China designed to function as propaganda tours. Taken together, these developments reveal a coordinated strategy: the CCP is pursuing every available avenue to weaken, influence, and ultimately destabilize the United States, with a particular focus on schools, universities, and the next generation of American leaders.
Many Americans are already familiar with the Confucius Institutes that once proliferated across U.S. college campuses, nominally as language and cultural centers but in practice as propaganda hubs and, in some cases, surveillance outposts. The encouraging news is that sustained public scrutiny and bipartisan concern led to the closure or rebranding of many of these entities, but the discouraging reality is that Chairman Xi Jinping has not abandoned his ambition to shape American minds through education; he has simply adapted.
In June 2024, Xi sent a letter to the president of Kean University in New Jersey, using the language of cultural exchange to advance a far more strategic objective. In that letter, Xi urged universities in both countries to cultivate young envoys who know both countries well, a phrase later repeated in a Xinhua dispatch the same day, and while young envoys is a Chinese term for diplomatic emissary, in this context it signals a deliberate effort to mold how American students perceive Chinas regime, its ideology, and its place in the global order.
This is not a vague or informal aspiration; Beijing has given it a name and a doctrine. The CCP describes its project to reshape international relations as the Community of Common Destiny, a concept that sounds benign but in practice envisions a world increasingly aligned with Chinese Communist norms and interests, and in 2018, Chinas top diplomat publicly described this Community of Common Destiny as the overall goal of Chinas foreign affairs work in the new era, making clear that it is the guiding star of Beijings external strategy.
There is little reason to believe that genuine mutual understanding or ideological pluralism will characterize this new era the CCP is trying to usher in. A 2023 white paper issued by Beijing explicitly states that these exchanges are not intended to promote Western values, which it derides as so-called universal values, but instead to advance the common values of humanity embedded in Chinese civilization, a formulation that conveniently centers CCP-approved interpretations of culture and morality.
The regimes internal directives are even more revealing. A 2013 internal CCP document instructs party officials to suppress constitutional democracy, universal values, and civil society within Chinas borders, leaving no doubt about the partys hostility to the very principles that underpin American constitutional government, and the same party that formally orders its cadres to crush so-called universal values at home is now pouring resources into programs designed to export Chinese ideological frameworks abroad, including into American classrooms.
Xi is not merely issuing rhetorical calls; he is backing his words with concrete policy and substantial funding. In a November 2023 speech, he pledged to bring 50,000 Americans to China, and Beijing soon rolled out the pointedly named Young Envoys Scholarship to fulfill that promise, a program under which the Chinese government pays for American students travel and stays at Chinese universities, ensuring that the narrative they encounter is tightly managed.
The flagship fellowship under this initiative sends American students on guided tours of government entities and universities, paired with Chinese peers who can reinforce official talking points and social cues. According to Chinas own ambassador, in the first year alone 14,000 Americans traveled to China under Xis exchange initiative, a staggering figure that illustrates how quickly this program is scaling and how many young Americans are being exposed to CCP-curated messaging.
Evidence suggests these trips are having the intended effect. One 2024 trip from Muscatine High School in Iowa culminated with students presenting Xi with a banner that read, Grandpa Xi, Here We Are, a striking display of personal affection toward the leader of an authoritarian regime, and that trip, notably, was fully funded by the Chinese government, raising serious questions about the nature of the influence being purchased.
Another 2024 excursion resulted in a Carleton College student publicly praising Beijing Normal University, or BNU, as an admirable institution. Yet The New York Times has reported that BNU is plagued by a malicious tip-off culture in which students are encouraged to report professors who deviate from CCP orthodoxy, and one professor there was fired for the supposed offense of criticizing Mao Zedong and praising Western civilization, a stark reminder of the ideological environment these American students are being invited to celebrate.
American institutions are not passive observers in this process; in many cases, they are active partners. Defending Educations report found that 83 universities and 26 K-12 schools in the United States are already operating Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) programs, indicating that this is not a fringe initiative but one that has penetrated mainstream educational networks.
The program has also received endorsements from influential higher education organizations. A vice president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which represents more than 400 institutions, publicly emphasized the importance of promoting the Young Envoys Scholarship at a 2024 event in China, and that same year, the Institute of International Education co-hosted a webinar promoting the program, even though IIE administers the Fulbright Program on behalf of the U.S. State Department and is supposed to be a vehicle for projecting American soft power abroad.
Instead, the organization charged with advancing American cultural and academic influence has, in this instance, helped China project its own. To make matters worse, officials from the Biden administration attended the Young Envoys Scholarship launch event in Washington in January 2024, lending the imprimatur of the U.S. government to a program explicitly designed to advance Beijings worldview.
Our own institutions have largely failed to ask the most basic question: whose agenda are they serving by embracing and promoting these exchanges. Rather than defending American values and interests, they have thrown their weight behind a program that advances Beijings vision of the global order at the expense of our own, effectively outsourcing part of our civic education to a foreign authoritarian power.
The current administration has been willing to scrutinize Chinese students and researchers coming to the United States, citing espionage and security concerns, but it has not applied the same level of vigilance to American students traveling to China on CCP-funded programs. That asymmetry is dangerous, and Congress should move swiftly to investigate the Young Envoys Scholarshipits funding streams, its institutional partnerships, and whether participating universities and school districts have complied with federal foreign gift reporting requirements under laws such as Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.
State legislatures also have a role to play in defending their citizens and their tax dollars. They can launch their own inquiries into how public universities and school districts are engaging with the Young Envoys Scholarship, demand full transparency about foreign funding and influence, and, where necessary, cut off taxpayer support for institutions that refuse to disentangle themselves from CCP-backed initiatives.
For university presidents, school superintendents, and school board members, the issue is even more straightforward. They must decide whether their institutions endorse what Xis own Politburo has declared to be the programs purpose: teaching foreigners why socialism with Chinese characteristics is good, a mission that stands in direct conflict with the principles of limited government, individual liberty, and free-market economics that define the American experiment.
The CCPs objective is not subtle. It seeks to transform American students into what Xi himself has called diplomatic envoysinformal ambassadors and advocates for Chinas preferred vision of world order, a vision that normalizes one-party rule, suppresses dissent, and subordinates individual rights to state power.
Xi has been remarkably transparent about Beijings ambitions on American campuses, from his letters to university leaders to his public pledges to bring tens of thousands of American students into Chinas ideological orbit. The tragedy is that many of our own institutions, from school districts to major universities to national education organizations, have chosen not to listen, or worse, to listen and cooperate anyway.
Reagan Dugan, Director of Higher Education Initiatives at Defending Education, has raised alarms about this growing network of influence, but the broader policy response has lagged behind the scale of the challenge. The views and opinions expressed in his commentary are his own and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation, yet they highlight a critical national security and cultural issue that conservatives have long warned about: the willingness of American elites to trade away civic confidence and sovereignty for the illusion of global harmony and academic exchange.
The Daily Caller News Foundation notes that all content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience, underscoring the importance of wide dissemination of these concerns. As the CCP deepens its efforts to shape American public opinion from the classroom up, the question is no longer whether Beijing is attempting to influence our youth, but whether American leaders will finally act to defend them.
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