Universities failed to disclose spending details for millions in Chinese funds, report shows

China provided more than $530 million to top-ranked American universities in recent years, but the schools failed to disclose how the funds were spent, prompting concerns about foreign influence, according to an open source intelligence report.

New York University, the largest recipient of Chinese funds, received $198 million between 2022 to 2024 and only reported to the federal government details on how $360,000 was spent, according to the report.

Beijing paid other schools tens of millions of dollars between 2022 and 2024. The major recipients included Stanford University ($50 million), Yale University ($35 million) and Duke University ($37 million), according to Education Department data.

Most of the schools failed to provide details on how the money was spent, raising concerns that the funds are intended to buy influence at U.S. universities, including among professors and students.

For example, Stanford disclosed in reports to the Education Department how $5.9 million of its Chinese money was spent; Yale provided details on $9.8 million; and Duke reported on $1.6 million of its Chinese funds.

The report by Data Abyss, a China-focused research firm, said the lack of transparency highlights what critics call Chinese “elite capture” — the use of money to influence intelligentsia — American professors, researchers and students to support Beijing’s political, economic and technology goals.

The report is based on newly released data required under Section 117 of the 1965 Higher Education Act.

The law requires all universities that receive federal funding to disclose foreign payments over $250,000.

The report, “Academic Capture: China’s Expanding Financial Footprint in U.S. Universities and the Transparency Gap,” was published this week by Parallax Advanced Research, a think tank.

Disclosure of the hidden Chinese funding at universities follows an executive order signed by President Trump in April ordering Education Secretary Linda McMahon to investigate universities that fail to comply with Section 117 reporting requirements.

“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” the order states.

The executive order said that during the first Trump administration, the Education Department probed 19 universities that failed to report $6.5 billion in foreign funding. The Biden administration limited the department’s ability to track the foreign funds, the order said.

Some of the funds have been linked to Chinese military and economic programs. Texas A&M University worked on a $10 million contract with Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, a facility that is linked to naval research for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the report said.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was given a $28 million contract from the Ningbo municipal government for a program called the Ningbo China Institute for Supply Chain Innovation that is involved in China’s Belt and Road international development program and China’s military-civil fusion program.

The Rochester Institute of Technology received $108 million for joint programs with Beijing Jiaotong University, an institution that works with the PLA on logistics and drones systems.

At Bryant University, the school joined in a $40 million partnership with Beijing Institute of Technology Zhuhai that is embedding Chinese Communist Party governance and ideological education.

Columbia University, an exception to the transparency lapses, disclosed how $31.5 million of its total of $43 million in Chinese money was spent on research, teaching chairs, scholarships, operations and infrastructure.

According to the report, 15 U.S. universities received $534.5 million since 2022, with tens of millions sent in a surge of funding between 2023 and 2024. NYU, for example, received $80 million from China in 2024.

“Without stronger disclosure requirements,  policymakers and the public are ‘flying blind’— able to see the scale of Chinese money but not its influence,” the report said.

“The selective transparency skews the narrative, risks masking strategic vulnerabilities, and undermines accountability at precisely the universities where Chinese funding is most concentrated.”

Of the 6,818 Education Department reports on China’s university funding, 889, or 13%, included descriptions of how the money was spent, with 87% lacking details.

At Harvard University, China provided the elite school with $44 million, with explanations on expenditures detailed for just $4.6 million that went to endowments for professors, financial aid for Chinese students and China focused programs, the Data Abyss report said.

Congress is investigating foreign funding at universities. House legislation passed in March calls for requiring all details of foreign funding by adversaries to be disclosed in detail.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wrote a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber in July asking for documents related to what the panel said is extensive evidence of links between the CCP and Harvard.

Specifically, committee investigators are probing Harvard’s ties to the CCP Organization Department, a unit in charge of promoting “Xi Jinping Thought,” the ideology of the Chinese president.

Harvard is considered a coveted educational institution for the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter, Xi Mingze, graduated from Harvard in 2014, and the school is said to be the preferred school for the offspring of other senior CCP leaders.

“That means correlations between foreign funds and their intended purposes can only be drawn in a handful of cases,” the report said. “The majority of reported Chinese gifts and contracts are therefore opaque, leaving most of the financial flows essentially non-transparent in terms of how they were directed inside U.S. universities.”

L.J. Eads, director of research intelligence at Parallax and author of the report, said the universities receiving the largest sums from China are providing the least transparency about what that money supports. 

“With only 13% of the Education reports showing how nearly a billion dollars in Chinese gifts were spent over the past two years shows “we have virtually no insight into how hundreds of millions of dollars are being used across U.S. universities, including public institutions,” he said.

“Even within that limited transparency, the details reveal troubling patterns, from professorships and endowed chairs to contracts where Beijing appears to hand-pick Chinese participants, raising concerns that the Chinese Communist Party is quietly steering who and what gets funded inside U.S. academia,” Mr. Eads said.

Former Rep. Mike Gallagher, until recently chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP, said China poses a threat to U.S. universities.

“Universities love Chinese students because they generally pay full freight, often subsidized by the Communist Party state,” Mr. Gallagher said in a recent Wall Street Journal article. “Universities need that money to feed their ever-expanding bureaucracies, and this dependency corrupts them.”

Stanford in 2023 paid $2 million to settle a Justice Department claim that the university failed to disclose foreign research funding.

In Michigan, the FBI arrested two Chinese nationals at the University of Michigan who are charged with smuggling a potential “agroterrorism weapon” into the U.S.