A recent investigation published at Stanford University reveals that a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agent impersonated a Stanford student, using the alias Charles Chen, to collect information on students who were conducting sensitive STEM research on China relevant to geopolitical competition. “Chen” messaged students on an app monitored by the CCP to track the students’ research and recruit them to work in China.
Members of the Stanford community have long speculated that Chinese spies have been part of their university, but the recent investigation from the Stanford Review confirmed that “the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford.”
According to the Review, the strategy of the CCP is a “non-traditional” approach to espionage: “The Chinese Communist Party has employed a ‘crowdsourced approach’ to gathering information at Stanford. … The Chinese Ministry for State Security (MSS) uses civilians unaffiliated with the intelligence community to acquire and report sensitive information.” In other words, seemingly benign Chinese students applying to American universities are using their relationships with fellow students to send critical information and intelligence back to the MSS.
The Review interviewed several people involved with the university who revealed details of these spy tactics. The Review writes, “A China expert, familiar with Stanford, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that of the approximately 1,129 Chinese International students on campus, a select number are actively reporting to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law mandates that all Chinese citizens support and cooperate with state intelligence work regardless of location.”
This phenomenon of Chinese espionage at American universities is not limited to Stanford, as several other elite universities have revealed similar findings.
After a Washington Free Beacon report found that the University of Michigan’s partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University brought several spies to the American campus, Michigan withdrew from its partnership with the Shanghai university. The CCP-linked school, however, still maintains relationships with Yale University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California-Berkeley, among others.
According to the Beacon’s report, “the Department of Justice has charged at least 12 University of Michigan students, researchers, and recent graduates—all Chinese nationals—with national security-related offenses. … Five of them were accused of taking photographs of military drills. … They all belonged to an engineering partnership between Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong, which was helping the CCP modernize its military.”
Even after the partnership with the Shanghai university ended, “At least six more Chinese students were accused this year of smuggling in dangerous biological materials, including parasitic roundworms and a fungal pathogen that federal prosecutors described as a ‘potential agroterrorism’ weapon,” the Beacon wrote.
The Department of Justice investigated Harvard University this past July for potentially violating “federal civil rights law by accepting foreign funding that carried preferences for students from particular countries.”
The Harvard Crimson reported that its university had “disclosed more than $36 million in gifts from sources attributed to China and Hong Kong that carried financial aid preferences tied to students’ countries, nationalities, geographic regions, or international status.”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon wrote to the University that Harvard “appears to be accepting these funds with restrictions and conditions from China-based sources and then providing this student financial aid with preference to foreign students based on their national origin, presumably Chinese,” the Crimson added.
More recently, the Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing their funding. Instead of conforming to these orders, “Many universities retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as rebranded Confucius Institutes,” Time Magazine reported.
In recent years, the University of Notre Dame has cut ties with several institutions due to alleged connections to the CCP. In July 2025, Notre Dame withdrew from the China Scholarship Council, a China-backed scholarship program. This action followed President Trump’s release of Proclamation 10043, which encouraged universities to prioritize American interests and national security and suspended the entry of certain Chinese graduate students and researchers into the country.
Nevertheless, Notre Dame still operates an influential liberal arts college in China—the Beijing Global Gateway—and is engaged in various collaborative endeavors in China as a result of the program.
The university also continues to maintain the Greater China Scholars Program, which offers scholarships and grants for top students from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. This program has brought 479 Chinese-nationals thus far to the school. Some critics, such as Father Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., are also concerned that the university has worked with corporations that benefit the CCP, whilst China actively persecutes the Catholic Church.
Raymond Webber is a junior philosophy major. His favorite hobby is listening to Bishop Fulton Sheen homilies on YouTube. Contact him at rwebber2@nd.edu.