Eighty-three American colleges and universities are currently hosting a Chinese government program called the Young Envoys Scholarship that flies U.S. students to China for "intensive" trips designed to reshape how they think about the Communist regime. The program has already targeted 50,000 American students.
This isn't a cultural exchange. It's a recruiting pipeline with a Party logo on it.
The program is run by the China Education Association for International Exchange — CEAIE — an organization whose own Chinese-language website states that it will "always adhere to the leadership of the Party and integrate the Party's work into the entire process of the association's operation and development." CEAIE's president is Liu Limin, a former Vice Minister of Education of China. So when we say "Chinese government program," we mean it literally. The guy running it used to run China's education ministry.
The YES program — operating through the website youthlink.cn — offers short- and long-term trips to China where students attend forums on topics like "green energy," "technology," and the wonderfully vague "social governance." A 2026 trip brought American students to the Zhi-Xing China dialogue. A University of Chicago delegation participated in 2024. Indiana University students visited Xi'an Jiaotong University on a four-day exchange — the same Xi'an Jiaotong University that has been flagged for ties to sanctioned, Russia-linked, military and critical-technology entities.
Andrew Harding, a national security policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, didn't mince words about what this is. "While marketed as an educational exchange, it is best understood as part of the Chinese Communist Party's broader strategy to shape foreign perceptions of China among students and, ultimately, future professionals," he said. He added: "Beijing would not devote substantial resources to bringing thousands of Americans to China unless it expected a return in the form of improved perceptions."
The YES program's own website describes itself as a "key pillar and powerful enabler to deepen and expand cross-cultural understanding among countries." Which is CCP-speak for "we'd like to explain to your children why we're actually the good guys."
Thirteen California colleges are participating. Six of the eight Ivy League schools are in. UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Juilliard, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, University of Virginia, New York University, Harvard — the list reads like a U.S. News ranking crossed with a counterintelligence briefing.
Reagan Dugan, Director of Higher Education Initiatives at Defending Education, pointed out a glaring asymmetry: "US oversight must apply the same diligence to American students traveling to China at the behest of the CCP that they do to foreign students studying in America." We vet inbound foreign students. We apparently wave our own kids onto CCP-chartered planes with a smile.
We've been here before, of course. The Confucius Institutes program ran for years at American universities before federal investigators finally determined they were intentionally fostering pro-CCP perceptions. Those got shut down. Thirty American academic institutions were ordered to conduct security audits. And now the same operation is back under a new name, with a scholarship attached and a .cn web address.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has linked CEAIE to United Front operations — the CCP's foreign influence apparatus. The organization that runs this scholarship program is, by the Chinese government's own description, a Party organ. By any Western intelligence standard, this is an organized influence operation on allied soil.
We spent years debating whether TikTok was a national security threat because Beijing might use it to shape American opinions. Meanwhile, the CCP has actual offices coordinating actual trips for actual students at 83 actual universities. One of those problems got a congressional hearing. The other one got a scholarship brochure.