The FBI once opened a new China counterintelligence case every ten hours.
That was 2020 – and nothing has gotten better since.
Now a new documentary just caught American universities red-handed, and what Steve Cortes found in Champaign, Illinois should make every taxpayer in this country furious.
6,000 Chinese Nationals at One University and Biden Killed the Law Meant to Stop Them
There are 6,000 Chinese nationals enrolled at the University of Illinois – a publicly funded land-grant school sitting in the middle of America.
They're not random students looking for opportunity.
Cortes is direct about who these people are: families with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party – the elites of China, hand-selected to absorb America's best technology and take it back to Beijing.
At least 300,000 Chinese nationals are studying at U.S. universities nationwide.
Columbia University is nearly half foreign students.
Most selective schools sit at 25% international enrollment – and the private ones, which American taxpayers fund even more generously than public schools, are packed with them.
One American kid learned this the hard way.
Stanley Zhong – Asian American, 1,590 SAT score out of 1,600, 3.97 GPA from one of the most competitive high schools in California – applied to UCLA, Berkeley, and Illinois.
All three rejected him.
Google hired him straight out of high school.
The CCP Espionage Program Hidden Inside Your University's STEM Department
The House Select Committee on China – not a think tank, not a media outlet, your own Congress – investigated six major universities and found something that should wake up every American paying attention.
Biden refused to enforce Executive Order 10043, a ban specifically designed to keep Chinese nationals connected to military universities out of American research labs.
Four years of open doors.
The American Accountability Foundation just published a report on more than 10,000 Chinese scholars currently in U.S. universities on J-1 visas.
They found researchers with direct ties to Huawei – the telecom giant the U.S. government blacklisted as a national security threat.
They found scientists who previously worked at China's Aviation Industry Corporation, a CCP defense conglomerate the U.S. has sanctioned.
They found graduates of China's "Seven Sons of National Defense" – universities controlled directly by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the same ministry that runs China's Military-Civil Fusion strategy.
That strategy has one goal: take civilian research and turn it into military weapons.
Your tax dollars funded the research.
China gets the weapons.
How Biden's State Department Handed China a Master Key to America's Research Labs
Here's what universities won't tell you, and what the Biden administration buried in bureaucratic language.
In late 2024, Biden's State Department quietly removed the two-year home residency requirement for J-1 visa holders from 34 countries, including China.
That requirement existed for a reason.
It forced Chinese researchers to return home after their programs – limiting how long they could embed themselves in sensitive research networks.
Biden erased it.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center – a real government agency – identified the CCP as the single broadest, most active, and most persistent espionage threat to the United States.
No other country comes close.
The Chinese Scholarship Council, which funds roughly 15% of Chinese students at American universities, reportedly requires those students to submit regular "Situation Reports" to Chinese diplomatic missions – intelligence briefings on the research they're observing.
Stanford's own student newspaper confirmed this pattern after interviewing faculty and China specialists.
FBI Director Christopher Wray described the scale of Chinese intellectual property theft as "one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history."
This is happening right now, in your universities, with your money.
The Real Question Nobody in Washington Will Ask
Cortes gives a blunt answer: cap foreign students at 1-2% of total enrollment.
Chinese nationals – zero.
That's not racism. Cortes is explicit about that. This is about citizenship, national security, and a government that has demonstrated for decades it will steal anything we leave unguarded.
Senator Ashley Moody of Florida said it plainly when Trump began revoking Chinese student visas: "The U.S. is no longer in the business of importing espionage."
American universities got addicted to full-tuition foreign money – some would collapse financially without it – and convinced themselves the national security risk was someone else's problem.
It never was.
Sources:
- Steve Cortes, "U.S. Colleges Training China's Elites at America's Expense," RealClearPolitics/RCP Radio, February 16, 2026.
- Reagan Campbell, "He Had Near-Perfect SAT Scores. Was He Rejected in Favor of Foreign College Applicants?" The Daily Signal, February 13, 2026.
- Helen Raleigh, "Report: These Chinese Researchers at U.S. Universities Have CCP Ties," The Federalist, February 10, 2026.
- "Chinese Students with CCP Membership, Military Links 'Infiltrate' U.S. Universities," Just the News, February 2026.
- "From Ph.D. to PLA," House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, December 2025.
- "Investigation: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford," Stanford Review, May 2025.
- Christopher Wray, Remarks at the Hudson Institute, FBI.gov, July 7, 2020.