The Chinese Communist Party has long faced scrutiny over its influence operations at American universities
President Donald Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly view the Chinese Communist Party as a top threat to U.S. national security, with 91 percent of Trump’s base saying they want CCP-sponsored student groups out of American college campuses, according to a new poll.
“Trump’s base wants the CCP out of our classrooms,” the Vandenberg Coalition wrote in a summary of its joint survey with TargetPoint: “91 percent of respondents are concerned about CCP-sponsored Chinese Students and Scholars Associations—which are accused of funding campus encampments and disruptions—on college campuses, including 91 percent of younger MAGA voters (ages 18–44) and 89 percent of all Trump voters surveyed under the age of 30.”
Ninety percent of all Trump voters—including 92 percent of self-described “MAGA conservatives”—describe China as a major threat to the United States, with 76 percent labeling it a “high” or “extremely high” threat. While Trump voters support the president’s foreign policy, 60 percent believe that the United States should take an even tougher stance against Beijing, the poll found.
The CCP has long drawn scrutiny for seeking to infiltrate and exert influence over American higher education, and Chinese entities have funneled millions of dollars to U.S. universities in an attempt to peddle influence. Stanford University, for example, accepted more than $27 million from such entities in 2021 and early 2022.
China has also created “a fertile human capital recruiting ground” at Harvard University, leveraging multimillion-dollar investments in the Ivy League school to enlist professors and students in “projects that involve sensitive and advanced technologies,” according to a report in June.
Chinese funding for American schools skyrocketed under the Biden administration because the administration stopped enforcing a federal code governing how foreign gifts and donations are reported, then-Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) told the Washington Free Beacon in 2023.
Some partnerships between American and Chinese researchers appear to have contributed to the CCP’s ongoing human rights abuses. China’s largest facial recognition company, for example, donated an undisclosed amount of money to MIT in 2018 to fund research on facial recognition technology, the Free Beacon reported last year. That company, SenseTime, has used such technology to help the Chinese government “track and control” Uyghurs.
The Vandenberg-TargetPoint poll found that 95 percent of Trump supporters are concerned about “China’s ability to exploit CCP-created vulnerabilities in U.S. critical infrastructure, such as Chinese solar inverters on U.S. electrical grids with self-destruct features and Chinese telecommunications companies exposing customer data.” More than 85 percent want to stop China from acquiring U.S. land and support efforts to shift more pharmaceutical manufacturing to the United States to reduce reliance on Beijing, according to the poll.
