A whistleblower just blew the doors off Stanford University's private foreign-funding records, and what's inside is exactly what you suspected — millions upon millions of dollars flowing in from donors linked directly to the Chinese Communist Party. The same school that built an entire censorship machine to police "misinformation" during COVID was quietly depositing checks from Beijing.
Academic freedom, brought to you by the CCP. How inspiring.
The leaked documents, first reported by The Stanford Review, reveal a staggering web of CCP-connected cash. Xiaoxin Chen, son of Chen Yuan — the former Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and former President of China Development Bank — donated $1,020,000 to Stanford in 2024 alone. His father Chen Yuan sat atop one of China's most powerful state-run financial institutions from 1998 to 2013. His aunt, Chen Weili, was a visiting scholar at the university. The family was practically running a Stanford franchise.
But it gets worse. William Ding, CEO of NetEase and a representative of the 11th Guangdong Provincial People's Congress plus a member of the 13th CPPCC, poured $25.1 million into Stanford between 2020 and 2021. Diana Chen, CEO of Pioneer Group Holdings and a Beijing Committee member of the 11th, 12th, and 13th CPPCC — plus an Executive Member of the China Overseas Friendship Association — kicked in $6.2 million in 2023.
That's not a donation. That's a down payment.
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C. C. Tung, a governor of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, donated $3 million between 2020 and 2024 alongside Harriet W. Tung. Dowson Tong, President of Tencent's Cloud and Smart Industries Group, contributed $800,000 in 2024-2025. The Ma Huateng Foundation gave $5.45 million in 2019. Jingdong Group — that's JD.com — sent $3.9 million between 2018 and 2021. The Guangdong Qitian Institute dropped $4.75 million from 2019 to 2023.
And those are just the individuals. State-controlled enterprises were writing checks too. State Grid Corporation of China gave $1.5 million in 2019. The Chinese Academy of Sciences contributed $1.1 million in 2018. Huawei Technologies — yes, that Huawei — gave $250,000 in 2019-2020. China National Petroleum Corporation has been sending $380,000 as recently as 2023-2026. China National Technical Import & Export Corporation ponied up $619,000 in 2022.
As The Stanford Review put it: "What the disclosures show is a university that studies Chinese influence operations while accepting money from the people who run them."
Read that again. Stanford runs the SECURE program — funded by $67 million in taxpayer dollars from the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the National Science Foundation — supposedly to counter foreign threats. They had a program literally called "China's Global Sharp Power." Meanwhile, they were cashing checks from entities tied to the United Front Work Department, which exists specifically to project CCP influence abroad.
The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned about exactly this kind of thing in July 2022. Americans for Public Trust found that foreign adversaries invested $800 million into American universities in 2024 alone. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires disclosure of foreign funding. Stanford's response? Their "longstanding practice" is "not to disclose donor names or gift details without the donor's authorization." How convenient.
Oh, and Professor David Palumbo Liu — co-founder of the Campus Anti-Fascist Network at Stanford — had this gem about campus speech: "When Zionists say they don't feel safe on campus, I've come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel. Get used to it." That's the caliber of intellectual running the place while CCP money floods in through the back door.
Meanwhile, a Stanford undergraduate named Elsa Johnson faced CCP surveillance. The very foreign power funding the university was targeting its own students. And Li Rui, Mao Zedong's former secretary, had his diaries housed at the Hoover Institution — which Beijing has pressured to return.
This isn't complicated. Our most elite institutions are for sale, and our biggest adversary is the one buying. Stanford took the money, kept it quiet, and had the audacity to lecture the rest of us about truth and democracy while doing it.
Thank God for whistleblowers.
