Eighty-three American colleges and universities are participating in a Chinese government program explicitly designed to shape how American students think about China. The program is called the Young Envoys Scholarship — YES, for short — and it was launched in 2024 at the personal direction of Chinese President Xi Jinping with a target of bringing 50,000 U.S. students to China.
The same schools that disinvite conservative speakers over "safety concerns" are shipping students to Beijing on the CCP's dime.
The program operates through the China Education Association for International Exchange, or CEAIE — an organization whose president, Liu Limin, is a former Vice Minister of Education of China. The CEAIE's own materials describe its guiding ideology as "Marxism-Leninism" and "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism." That's not buried in some classified intelligence assessment. It's on their website.
The participating schools aren't exactly community colleges. Six of the eight Ivy League schools are in. MIT. Stanford. UCLA. UC Berkeley. NYU. University of Chicago. Johns Hopkins. Duke. Northwestern. University of Virginia. Juilliard. Thirteen California institutions alone are involved.
Andrew Harding, a Heritage Foundation policy analyst for national security, explained what the program actually 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."
In 2024, University of Chicago students visited the Beijing People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Indiana University ran a four-day exchange at Xi'an Jiaotong University. In 2026, the program hosted something called "Zhi-Xing China: U.S.-China Youth Leaders Dialogue" — covering green energy, technology, and "social governance." That last one is CCP-speak for how to manage a population.
Reagan Dugan, Director of Higher Education Initiatives at Defending Education, put the accountability question plainly: "US oversight must apply the same diligence to American students traveling to China at the behest of the CCP."
We've been down this road before. The Confucius Institutes operated on American campuses for years before federal investigators found they were intentionally fostering pro-CCP perceptions among students. Those got shut down. So the CCP rebranded and came back with a new name and a bigger budget — 50,000 students this time — and 83 schools signed right up.
The U.S. Department of Education has ordered 30 academic institutions to conduct research security audits regarding foreign entity collaborations. Thirty. Out of eighty-three. Which means more than fifty schools running a program funded by a hostile foreign government guided by Marxism-Leninism haven't even been asked to look into it.
American universities will put a professor on leave for using the wrong pronoun in a lecture. They'll convene emergency committees over a visiting speaker's tweets. But a program designed by Xi Jinping himself to influence American students? That gets a welcome packet and a campus liaison.
When the ideology printed on the brochure is Marxism-Leninism, it's not an exchange. It's a recruitment pitch.
