Strategy Risks, a private “business intelligence firm” based in New York City, has issued a deeply concerning report about Chinese penetration of American higher education. It takes the form of a detailed examination of how Missouri State University (MSU) became an eager partner to the Chinese defense industry.   

Issued on June 24, the report, Heartland for Hire, has so far been ignored by the mainstream press. Not a word about it is to be found in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post.  Regional newspapers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star likewise found nothing about this worthy of notice.   

The conservative press, however, has shown up. The Epoch Times covered it, Fox News reported on it, and the Washington Free Beacon ran a significant story. A substack called Pekingnology also posted a lengthy attempt by Zichen Wang to dismiss the Strategy Risks reports as an exercise in groundless suspicion. My own suspicions having been aroused, I am skeptical of Mr. Wang’s conclusions, but I welcome his willingness to consider Heartland for Hire on its merits. 

My aim in this essay is simply to draw attention to what I take to be one of the most important contributions in recent years to the examination of how China has used—and misused—its access to American higher education.  The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has been on this beat for the last 12 years. We were effectively the first to blow the whistle on “Confucius Institutes,” and our 2017 study, Outsourced to China, played a key role in curbing this particular avenue by which Beijing attempted to export its influence to American higher education. We have since maintained a close watch on Chinese subversion of colleges and universities, and some of our findings have proven valuable to the Department of Defense (or Department of War) and various law enforcement agencies.   

China’s efforts to gain influence in the United States—and around the world—go far beyond higher education.  To the extent the general public pays attention to China’s extra-territorial actions, we hear more about the theft of American technology, the arrest of Chinese spies, Chinese manipulation of contracts, and Chinese diversion of capital. These themes come up often in the news and in recent books such as The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets and Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.  

These concerns are fully justified, but the importance of China’s efforts in American higher education is not to be underestimated. The campus is typically an unguarded point of access to other institutions. For example, one of our researchers, Lilla Kiss, documented how China uses Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida, to train students in American aviation technology, bypassing American safeguards. Kiss also documented China’s use of secondary schools to gain access to training prohibited at colleges and universities. And NAS has just published a major report by Ian Oxnaevad on government officials colluding with China to divert control of American energy policy to Beijing. It turns out that links between Chinese universities and the University of California were crucial in executing this scheme.   

But Strategy Risks has accomplished something beyond NAS’s reach. Drawing on “Chinese-language government recruitment notices, industry association circulars, and consular records,” it “cross-referenced these against Missouri State’s Board of Governors agendas and internal audit reports” to provide an immaculately detailed account of how this program worked.   

What program? The Chinese Communist Party used MSU in a way we had not seen before. It was not a target of espionage, property theft, or attempts to manipulate students. In fact, China went out of its way to avoid doing things it routinely does elsewhere, apparently in an effort to keep this operation invisible. What MSU did was supply advanced training to elite personnel in China’s defense industry.   

Much of this training crossed red lines, bringing MSU into a close relationship with the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Aviation Industry Corporation (AVIC).   

I am not going to attempt in this brief article to summarize the Strategy Risks’s report, but I’ll say that unlike Zichen Wang at Pekingnology, I find the report scrupulous in method and compelling in detail. If the American mainstream press cannot find anything of interest here, I trust that the U.S. State Department, the Department of War, and the FBI can, and of course, Congress. 

NAS will have more to say about the report in due course. But at this point, I commend the reader to the report itself, Heartland for Hire is an exemplary investigation of an elusive target. It attempts in the report to focus public interest by citing the large amount of U.S. taxpayer funds that have been spent at MSU to subsidize agents of the Chinese government—some $27,000 per student for more than 1,500 students.   

With waste and fraud so common in our public colleges and universities, I doubt this revelation will galvanize the response Strategy Risks hoped for, but perhaps the discovery of how complacently a major university has lent itself to training America’s principal international adversary will prove more disquieting. 

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