A recent TikTok scroll session led me into a rabbit hole of videos covering the case of University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier. In December 2015, he traveled to North Korea as part of a guided tour with a private Chinese travel company that marketed to college students. One month later, he was arrested at the airport for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel. After an hour-long trial widely criticized as a political show, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. While imprisoned, he fell into a coma under unclear circumstances—many suspect torture by the government—and in June 2017, he was released to the U.S. in a vegetative state. He died just six days later, sparking international outrage and aggravating U.S./North Korea relations. A U.S. travel ban to North Korea promptly ensued.
Warmbier’s case is intriguing not only because of his mysterious death, but also because of what it suggests about how perceived espionage cases are handled in some foreign countries. In places like North Korea, outsiders—including foreign students—are deeply scrutinized and punished harshly for even minor infractions.
With growing concerns about academic espionage on U.S. campuses, the American response has been strikingly permissive—advancing policies that, intentionally or not, have made it easier for foreign actors to operate within our universities.
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In August, the Heritage Foundation held an event titled “How to Stop ‘Academic Espionage’ on Campus,” featuring Stanford undergraduates Elsa Johnson and Garret Molloy. These students previously published an article in the Stanford Review detailing how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had infiltrated their campus. In particular, Johnson recalled the case of a suspicious contact who, posing as “Charles Chen” on Instagram, lured students to travel to China without a visa to “not alert U.S. authorities.”
Furthermore, their investigation showed that China uses its own overseas students as agents of espionage, often through coercion. As Johnson told the College Fix, under China’s 2017 national security law, Chinese nationals must provide information to the government upon request. This means that research conducted by more than 1,100 Chinese students studying at Stanford—many in artificial intelligence, robotics, or other tech-related subjects—could be compromised. Pressure can also come from threats against family residing in China or requirements to report information after accepting funding from the China Scholarship Council.
Although Johnson and Molloy were labeled racist after the publication of their article, they stress their concern is not about “targeting Chinese people” but rather about protecting them from transnational intimidation and coercion.
Stanford responded to the article, stating that it would review the reports and contact federal law enforcement. Johnson notes, however, that despite the university’s promise to investigate, “it clearly isn’t important to them because this has been going on at Stanford and other universities for so long and nothing has been done about it.”
The Department of Education (ED), in an August bulletin, issued guidance to universities on dealing with foreign threats to research, acknowledging the severity of the growing presence of academic espionage on U.S. college campuses. ED Chief Investigative Counsel Paul Moore said, “For decades, hostile foreign actors have exploited the open nature of America’s taxpayer-funded research universities for their benefit, stealing critical technology and research, planting spies, and poaching talent to commit espionage against the United States.”
Yet Trump is touting a plan to allow 600,000 Chinese students to attend U.S. colleges and universities, arguing that foreign enrollment is essential to keeping many institutions financially afloat. This proposal would more than double the roughly 270,000 Chinese students already enrolled in American universities. It also sits uneasily beside Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s May announcement that the administration would “aggressively” revoke visas for Chinese nationals tied to the CCP or working in “critical fields.”
The risks of such an expansion are not hypothetical. American universities, eager for full-tuition payers, treat foreign students as financial lifelines—a dynamic that creates an obvious blind spot. As Minding the Campus contributor Ian Oxnevad warns, flooding institutions with hundreds of thousands of additional Chinese nationals would “throw gasoline on an already well-lit fire,” channeling sensitive research toward America’s top geopolitical adversary while squeezing U.S. students out of elite STEM programs and the high-paying jobs that follow.
Referring to the labor market effect, he writes:
To cut labor costs, American companies often fill high-tech roles in science, math, and engineering (STEM) fields by hiring workers from abroad. In 2019, 23.1 percent of all STEM workers in the U.S. were foreign nationals. A 2024 report by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics found that the proportion of foreign-born workers in STEM fields increased to 26 percent, with naturalized citizens comprising a larger share of the STEM workforce than native-born Americans. If 600,000 Chinese students were to enter U.S. universities, it is reasonable to envision a sizable number of them working in American STEM fields, effectively insourcing foreign labor from the U.S.’s top adversary into some of its most sensitive fields and most lucrative jobs.
As the Heritage Foundation panel noted, with more than 1.1 million foreign students in the U.S.—and a third of enrollment at Ivy League schools—it is evident that colleges and universities do not partner with the federal government to screen who they admit. “[One] million is too many for the federal government to review carefully,” Senior Heritage Fellow Jay Greene noted. Assistant General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Education, Paul Moore, added that this leaves taxpayers’ $55 billion annual investment in research dangerously exposed.
Otto Warmbier’s story captures one extreme: paranoia so total that a stolen poster becomes a national-security emergency. The United States represents the inverse extreme: a complacency so deep that genuine espionage threats barely register. Even as credible evidence mounts that foreign governments—especially the Chinese Communist Party—use academic channels to extract research, influence institutions, and pressure students, American universities respond with denial or defensiveness. More troubling still, that same complacency now extends to the Trump administration, which has floated a plan to dramatically expand Chinese student enrollment despite its own warnings about academic espionage. The answer is not North Korean paranoia, nor America’s current shrug, but a sane middle ground—one that protects legitimate academic exchange while taking real national-security threats seriously.
With billions in taxpayer-funded research, sensitive technology, and the futures of American students at stake, Washington must adopt a posture of clear-eyed vigilance.
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