Nearly two dozen Chinese academics working at some of America's most elite universities and laboratories have been identified as participants in Chinese Communist Party talent recruitment programs designed to funnel U.S. research and intellectual property back to Beijing.
The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative nonprofit watchdog group, published the findings in a report titled "Chinese Scientist Infiltration Threat Assessments." The names span Cornell University, Purdue University, Penn State, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie Mellon University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory — institutions that sit at the center of American scientific and defense research.
The AAF concluded these individuals, because of what it described as the dual-use nature of their research, close ties to China's military research sector, and clear connections to the CCP, should be expelled from the United States or barred from re-entry.
The CCP's Thousand Talents Program is the most infamous of these recruitment pipelines, but it is far from the only one. The Hundred Talents Program, established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994, the Chunhui (Spring Light) Program, which became Ministry of Education policy in 1996, and others form an interlocking web of initiatives with a single strategic purpose: extracting advanced knowledge from Western institutions and redirecting it toward Chinese state objectives.
The Department of Justice described the architecture plainly in 2020:
China's Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese talent recruitment plans that are designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China's scientific development, economic prosperity and national security… these talent programs seek to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China and reward individuals for stealing proprietary information.
According to Just the News, the Thousand Talents Program's website, since deleted by the Chinese government, acknowledged that its leadership group comprised the Central Committee of the CCP, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, among other state entities. This was never a loose academic exchange network. It was centrally directed by the Party.
The House Select Committee on the CCP reinforced the scale of the problem in its 2024 "CCP on the Quad" report:
China's Thousand Talents Plan is well known, but it is just one of hundreds of talent programs developed by the PRC to acquire cutting-edge technology and knowledge from abroad.
Hundreds.
These programs serve a goal that Xi Jinping has stated openly: transforming the People's Liberation Army into a "world-class military" by 2049. The House Select Committee directly linked talent recruitment to the CCP's Military-Civil Fusion strategy, characterizing it as a "critical ingredient" of the plan to redirect ostensibly civilian research into military applications.
The AAF report doesn't deal in abstractions. It names individuals, traces their funding, and maps their institutional connections. Several cases stand out for the specificity of the national security risk they present.
Zhao was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell's Jiang Lab. He is now listed as a "Doctoral Supervisor" and "Hundred Talents Program Researcher" at Zhejiang University's College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, focused on precision nano-hybrid biological agents and smart nano-vaccines. His earlier research at a Chinese university was funded in part by the Thousand Talents Program for Young Professionals, as well as by the National Key Research Development Programs of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He received his PhD at Nankai University — which Nature Magazine assessed was among the top five domestic collaborators with the People's Liberation Army.
The AAF report warned:
Dr. Yu Zhao posed a high national security risk because his research advances precision biological payload delivery systems that are widely recognized as strategically sensitive… this risk is no longer theoretical: Zhao has returned to China and accepted a postdoctoral position under Zhejiang University's Hundred Talents Program, effectively placing U.S.-derived expertise inside a PRC system designed to absorb and operationalize advanced foreign research.
Zhejiang University is no ordinary institution. The House Select Committee on the CCP assessed in 2025 that it is co-administered by SASTIND — China's defense-industry body — holds classified PRC research credentials, operates defense laboratories, and has conducted cybersecurity research funded by the Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence agency.
Zhao did not respond to a request for comment.
Geng was listed as an assistant research professor at Penn State and was associated with its Materials Processing and Characterization Laboratory. Some of his work at Penn State was conducted in part at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a U.S. Department of Energy facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was also an "overseas project leader" for the Chinese Ministry of Education's Chunhui Program — a recruitment initiative the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission described in 2020 as targeting "high-profile Chinese scholars appointed to teaching positions at prominent universities."
Geng's profile indicates he left Penn State in 2025. He now appears to be an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University — a school that former National Counterintelligence and Security Center head Bill Evanina warned in 2025 "has historically been tied to the CCP's intelligence and cyber hacking programs." The chairman of the House CCP committee said in 2024 that the university "has helped drive China's military modernization and intelligence capabilities, including by contributing to the development of nuclear weapons, carrier rockets, nuclear submarines, and fighter jets."
The AAF report laid out the concern directly:
Peihao Geng's involvement with the Los Alamos Laboratory, coupled with his current association with a SASTIND-affiliated University, and his role in Chinese overseas recruitment programs, is highly significant from a national security perspective.
Geng also collaborated on a 2025 research project on large language models with Penn State professor Jingjing Li, who herself graduated from both Beihang University and Tsinghua University. Beihang has been blacklisted by the Pentagon and the Commerce Department for years. The House Select Committee described it as a university that "adheres to the principle of educating talents for the Party and the nation" and "is guided by the Party's leadership." Tsinghua is co-supervised by SASTIND and has a documented history of involvement in defense research and alleged cyberattacks targeting international entities.
Geng did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Li.
Zebin Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focused on data analytics for material science and advanced manufacturing. His prior research received support from a constellation of CCP-linked sources: the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, the Thousand Talents Program, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Ministry of Education, the National Science Foundation of China, and the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality. He attended the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sichuan University — both identified by congressional investigators. The House Select Committee called the Beijing Institute a "problematic Chinese institution." Sichuan University was assessed as SASTIND-affiliated.
The AAF report was blunt:
Dr. Li has participated in one of China's talent programs which are notorious for espionage and intellectual property theft activities. The U.S. cannot allow a high-risk researcher like Dr. Li into the country.
His work at Wisconsin receives both U.S. federal funding and Chinese government funding simultaneously. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Chen is a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue, working with Prof. Junjie Qin. He completed his PhD in 2023 at the University of Macau under the supervision of Prof. Yonghua Song — who, according to his biography at the University of Macau, had been the "Director of Chinese National Office of the Recruitment Program of Global Experts." The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations assessed in 2019 that the "Recruitment Program of Global Experts" was another name for the Thousand Talents Program.
Song submitted a letter to Xi Jinping in 2018. Xi replied, "with important instructions through the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China." Song won a State Scientific and Technological Progress Award in 2020 at a ceremony attended by Xi.
Chen also received degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University — which the House Select Committee described as co-administered by SASTIND — and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, where the Pentagon placed a defense laboratory on its list of foreign institutions engaging in problematic activity. The AAF report concluded Chen "should never have been allowed access into the country."
Chen, Qin, and Song did not respond to requests for comment.
Xu, a drone research expert at Carnegie Mellon, previously served as a chapter leader of the CCP chapter at Tsinghua University in China. He used his position at Carnegie Mellon to recruit PhD students, publicly announcing that he would join the University of Hong Kong as a tenure-track assistant professor starting in Spring 2026. His recruitment post asked prospective students to consider how "cutting-edge CV/AI advances" could "empower running robots, flying drones, and soaring satellites" — technologies with obvious dual-use military applications.
Xu did not respond to a request for comment.
None of these cases exists in isolation. The CCP has been running these recruitment programs for three decades. The Hundred Talents Program dates to 1994. The Chunhui Program became policy in 1996, born directly from the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests, when Beijing sought to bring overseas Chinese researchers back into its orbit. Xi Jinping himself has called the United Front "an important magic weapon for the party to defeat the enemy."
And the consequences of ignoring this are not hypothetical. Harvard professor Charles Lieber was found guilty in December 2021 on federal charges related to concealing his ties to the Wuhan University of Technology and the Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding. He was sentenced to time served and supervised release — and by 2025, he had joined Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School. Chinese national Zhengdong Cheng was charged by the DOJ in 2020 for allegedly seeking to defraud NASA while participating in the Hundred Talents Plan. He, too, was sentenced to time served.
The punishments have not matched the seriousness of the threat. Researchers exploit American openness, extract taxpayer-funded knowledge, and return it to institutions co-administered by Chinese defense ministries. The penalties amount to wrist slaps. The cycle continues.
FBI Director Kash Patel signaled that the current posture is changing. He told Just the News:
This FBI, under this leadership, has prioritized the threat against it by the CCP against us, and we've taken swift action.
The Pentagon maintains a red flag list warning about foreign talent recruitment programs that threaten national security interests, including both the Thousand Talents Plan and the Hundred Talents Plan. Congressional committees have produced increasingly detailed assessments of the Chinese universities where these researchers trained. The intelligence is not the problem. The action — or lack of it — has been.
For years, American universities operated as if prestige and federal grants existed in a separate universe from national security. They welcomed researchers whose funding trails led directly to CCP ministries. They hosted scholars from institutions the Pentagon had blacklisted. They treated the Thousand Talents Program as an awkward footnote rather than what the DOJ called it: a mechanism for stealing proprietary information.
The AAF report forces a question that elite academia has spent years avoiding: at what point does openness become negligence? When a researcher's PhD advisor corresponds directly with Xi Jinping, when a scholar's prior institution supplies the PLA's Rocket Force, when a postdoc's funding comes simultaneously from American taxpayers and Chinese defense-adjacent ministries — what exactly is the theory under which this is acceptable?
Every individual named in this report declined to comment. Every university involved stayed silent. The CCP deleted its own Thousand Talents website. The pattern is consistent: those who benefit from the arrangement have nothing to say about it.
The laboratories stay open. The research continues. And Beijing counts on the fact that American institutions will mistake silence for innocence.
