An Indiana college student joined a Zoom call to plan a commemoration of Tiananmen Square. A few days later, the authorities knocked on his parents’ door … in China. Our new video looks at the quiet influence of authoritarian countries on American college campuses. <\/p>\n
The year is 2020. A college student uses Zoom to plan a peaceful vigil with friends. Sounds like a familiar story, right? It isn’t. Because those Zoom sessions were being monitored by the government. And within days, authorities showed up at the door of that student’s parents and threatened them. Why would this happen to some college kid in Indiana? Because that vigil was to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And his parents were in China. College in America. It’s where young people go to expand their minds. To challenge their deepest held beliefs. And to learn the limits of their alcohol tolerance. That’s the idea, anyway. These days, however, there’s a growing feeling that something’s gone wrong on campus. And whichever side of the political divide you’re on, you can find a villain. Radical ideologies. Universities that behave more like hedge funds than institutions of learning. Pick your poison. But there’s another factor that gets lost amidst the culture war arguments. Just how much American universities are influenced by foreign governments. In ways that are often at odds with the college’s purported values of free speech and free thought. One of the biggest threats on this front is China. Right before the pandemic shut off the flow of foreign students, American universities hosted over 370,000 Chinese students. Nearly 35% of all foreign enrollees. And because international students usually pay more in tuition than domestic ones, they’re a goldmine for university finances. There’s just one catch to that revenue stream, however. The presence of Chinese students on American soil leads the government in Beijing to believe that it gets a say on what happens on American soil. That’s what happened to Moody Kong, the Purdue student we introduced you to earlier. Kong was part of a group planning an online commemoration of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. A subject the Chinese government prohibits its citizens from even discussing. The planning sessions took place on Zoom. And somehow information about them got back to Beijing, where authorities showed up at Kong’s parents’ door and threatened trouble if he didn’t stop speaking out. How did the Chinese government know? Members of Purdue’s chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, known as the CSSA, got wind of Kong’s plans and accused him of plotting to overthrow China’s government and distributed the phone number for a hotline meant to report espionage to Chinese authorities. Which was maybe not as unusual as it sounds. Because while the well over 100 CSSA chapters on American campuses advertise themselves as organizations that help Chinese students adjust to life in a new country, a 2018 congressional commission found that many of them coordinate closely with the Chinese government, try to conceal that relationship, and regularly communicate with Chinese intelligence. In other words, the Chinese government’s influence isn’t just at the door of American higher education. It’s already inside. And while those intimidation campaigns are a problem, how American universities respond to them is a bigger one. In Kong’s case, Purdue President Mitch Daniels said that students who would deny free speech rights to others, let alone collude with foreign governments in repressing them, would need to pursue their education elsewhere. Pretty strong stuff. And unfortunately, more the exception than the rule. In 2009, for example, North Carolina State University invited the Dalai Lama to speak. And because the Dalai Lama is associated with Tibetan independence, and because the Chinese government is 100% opposed to Tibetan independence, that invitation led to objections from the campus chapter of the Confucius Institute. What’s the Confucius Institute? A Chinese government-funded organization that Beijing has admitted exists for the purpose of spreading propaganda. The result of those complaints? The university canceled the event with the Dalai Lama, calling it a timing issue. Then later on, the school’s provost acknowledged not wanting to jeopardize relations with China. In 2013, Harvard hired Chinese dissident and human rights lawyer Teng Biao as a visiting fellow. Two years later, when he planned an on-campus event with another dissident, an administrator forced him to postpone it. And never reschedule. The reason? It coincided with a trip Harvard’s president was making to China. Notice the pattern? China’s influence on our universities isn’t what you’d call hard power. In many cases, it barely looks like power at all. It’s an implication, an insinuation, a complaint that carries an implicit threat. Which is why the China scholar Perry Link has compared it to an anaconda in a chandelier. The snake doesn’t have to move. It doesn’t have to strike. Everyone in the room knows it’s there and makes their adjustments accordingly. And this tactic works. A Wilson Center study on China’s influence in American higher education reported that many scholars interviewed for the study refused to be named in the final report for fear of retaliation. And it should be noted that this was true even of scholars who said they don’t self-censor. Although it should also be noted that they self-censor. And China isn’t the only country with this playbook. In 2026, data from the Department of Education revealed that the Middle Eastern Emirate of Qatar is the single largest international funder of American higher education, with $ 8.8 billion in donations. Now, for the record, there’s nothing inherently suspicious about foreign money. The third largest international funder of American higher ed, after all, is Germany, which supports something called the Goethe-Institut, an organization dedicated to introducing people to German culture. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Okay, there’s nothing morally wrong with that. But cozying up to Middle Eastern monarchies comes at a different kind of price. Northwestern University, for instance, runs a satellite campus in Qatar. In 2020, that campus was set to host an event featuring the lead singer of a Lebanese indie rock band, Who’s Gay? And Qatar is a country where being gay can result in prison time. That event, try to contain your shock, was moved to Northwestern’s main campus in Illinois. The university cited safety concerns. That would have been a tidy resolution, if Northwestern’s Qatari partners hadn’t publicly contradicted them. The issue, Qatar clarified, was the country’s social and cultural customs. And if you’d prefer not to import those values to the United States, bad news. A 2025 congressional investigation revealed that Northwestern’s contract with Qatar requires it to abide by Qatari laws, which include criminal punishments for criticizing the Qatari government. When asked if that meant Northwestern students or faculty could be punished for criticizing the government in Doha, the university’s president responded, Yeah, I have no idea. Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is a bit of a trend here. American universities take money from authoritarian regimes without worrying too much about what they’ve agreed to. All of which is a recipe for disaster. America has built a higher education system that’s the envy of the world. The fact that students from every country want to study here is proof of that. But what makes our universities special is the commitment to truth, to open inquiry, to the idea that you can say what you think, even if someone powerful doesn’t want you to. If our universities are so hungry for foreign money that they’ll sacrifice those values to get it, they undermine their entire reason for existing. What’s left of American higher ed at that point? Well, it’s pretty much just this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n