Earlier this month, news broke that a Chinese Communist Party intelligence official now owns a building overlooking the White House. Also this month, the House Select Committee on China released another investigative report on the CCP’s infiltration of American higher education. Somehow, also this month, Defending Education released a report on a CCP-funded program that brings American students on Chinese propaganda exchange trips. It’s clear that the CCP is pursuing every avenue to weaken and destabilize our country, especially our schools and universities.
Many Americans are familiar with the Confucius Institutes established by the CCP on US campuses, and how they were used to spread propaganda and even serve as surveillance outposts. The good news is that many have been disbanded. The bad news is that Chairman Xi still has designs on influencing Americans through education.
In a June 2024 letter to the President of Kean University, for example, Chairman Xi called on universities in the United States and China to “cultivate young envoys who know both countries well,” later echoed in a separate Xinhua dispatch the same day. “Young envoys” is a Chinese term for diplomatic emissary. This language points to a deliberate effort to reshape how Americans understand China and its role in the world. Beijing calls this effort to remake international relations the “Community of Common Destiny.” It was described in 2018 by China’s own top diplomat as “the overall goal of China’s foreign affairs work in the new era.”
But there is no reason to think that mutual understanding would characterize this “new era” envisioned by the CCP. A 2023 white paper, for example, makes it clear that these exchanges are not to spread Western values, which it dismisses as “so-called universal values,” but “the common values of humanity embedded in Chinese civilization.” A 2013 internal CCP directive likewise instructs party officials to suppress constitutional democracy, universal values, and civil society inside China. The same party that formally instructs its officials to suppress “so-called universal values” at home is funding programs to spread Chinese ones abroad.
Xi is backing up these words with concrete action. In a November 2023 speech, he pledged to bring 50,000 Americans to China. Beijing launched the conspicuously named “Young Envoys Scholarship” to make good on that promise. In the program, the Chinese government covers expenses for American students to travel to and stay at Chinese universities. The flagship fellowship sends American students on guided visits to government entities and universities, with Chinese peers. In the first year alone, 14,000 Americans traveled to China under Xi’s exchange initiative, according to China’s own ambassador.
The trips are working. One 2024 trip from Muscatine High School in Iowa ended with students gifting Xi a flag reading “Grandpa Xi, Here We Are.” The trip was fully funded by the Chinese government. Another 2024 trip led to a Carleton College student praising Beijing Normal University (BNU). The New York Times has reported that BNU has a “malicious tip-off culture” where students report on professors who stray from CCP narratives. One professor was fired for criticizing Mao and praising Western civilization.
American institutions are not bystanders — too often they actively promote the Young Envoys Scholarship. Our report at Defending Education found 83 universities and 26 K-12 schools already operating YES programs. A vice president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, representing more than 400 colleges and universities, highlighted the importance of promoting the program at a 2024 event in China. That same year, the Institute of International Education co-hosted a webinar promoting the program. IIE administers Fulbright on behalf of the State Department. The organization tasked with projecting American soft power abroad was helping China project its own. Officials from the Biden administration even attended the program’s launch event in Washington in January 2024.
Our own institutions have not asked whose agenda they are serving. They have promoted a program advancing Beijing’s vision of the world order in place of our own.
The current administration must apply the same scrutiny to American students traveling to China with funding from the Chinese government as it does to Chinese students studying in America. Congress, too, should investigate the Young Envoys Scholarship — its funding, its institutional partnerships, and whether the universities and school districts promoting it have disclosed this under federal foreign gift reporting requirements. State legislatures can similarly investigate their universities’ and school districts’ support of this program and cut taxpayer support.
University and school district administrators face a simpler question. Do their institutions agree with what Xi’s own Politburo declared the program’s purpose to be: teaching foreigners why socialism with Chinese characteristics is good?
The CCP aims to turn American students into what Xi himself called diplomatic envoys, advocates for China’s vision of the world order. Xi has spelled out Beijing’s designs on American campuses. Our institutions have chosen not to listen.
Reagan Dugan is the Director of Higher Education Initiatives at Defending Education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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