by WorldTribune Staff, February 9, 2026 Real World News

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has warned for years that the CCP views overseas education as a strategic tool for stealing other countries’ advanced scientific and technical knowledge.

According to a new report by a non-profit watchdog group, a number of America’s most elite colleges and labs have been “infiltrated” by Chinese nationals who are affiliated with the CCP’s “Thousand Talents Program” which aims to steal U.S. technology.

The American Accountability Foundation’s new research report, “Chinese Scientist Infiltration Threat Assessments”, notes that Chinese students working at some of America’s top colleges, often receiving U.S. federal funding (some of it from the Pentagon) to conduct research into advanced technologies have troubling backgrounds which could pose a risk to U.S. national security.

Researchers for the American Accountability Foundation reported finding nearly two dozen Chinese working at elite U.S. schools and labs “who because of the dual-use threat of their research, close ties to the military research sector in China, and/or clear ties to the Chinese Communist Party should be expelled from the United States or never be re-admitted.”

Related: Disgraced Harvard nanoscientist gets 3-year contract in China, May 14, 2025

The American universities in question, the reports said, include Cornell University, Purdue University, Penn State University, the University of Wisconsin, and Carnegie Mellon.

“The Chinese government’s since-deleted website for its Thousand Talents Program said its leadership working group was “composed of” the Central Committee of the CCP, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, among other Chinese entities, all showing the CCP’s control over the program,” Just the News reported on Feb. 8.

The American Accountability Foundation’s report also showed that a Chinese scientist had links to the CCP’s similarly named and closely linked Hundred Talents Program.

The report alleged that “Dr. Yu Zhao posed a high national security risk because his research advances precision biological payload delivery systems that are widely recognized as strategically sensitive” and argued that “this risk is no longer theoretical: Zhao has returned to China and accepted a postdoctoral position under Zhejiang University’s Hundred Talents Program, effectively placing U.S.-derived expertise inside a PRC system designed to absorb and operationalize advanced foreign research.”

Zhao’s LinkedIn profile and Google Scholar page both say he was very recently at Cornell University but that he has since returned to China to work at Zhejiang University. Cornell until recently said Zhao was a postdoctoral associate there, now listing him as a “former member” of the Jiang Lab at Cornell, which says it is “Focusing on Biomaterials and Drug Delivery.”

Zhejiang now lists Zhao as a “Doctoral Supervisor” and “Hundred Talents Program Researcher” at the school’s College of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The report noted that the leader of the CCP’s “Spring Sunshine” effort was also allowed to work at an advanced U.S. lab.

The report argued that “Peihao Geng’s involvement with the Los Alamos Laboratory, coupled with his current association with a SASTIND-affiliated University, and his role in Chinese overseas recruitment programs, is highly significant from a national security perspective.”

Geng’s online bio says that he is an assistant research professor at Penn State, and the Penn State website lists Geng as an “research associate alumni” at the school’s Materials Processing and Characterization Laboratory. This lab focuses on “thermodynamics and kinetics in materials modeling.” Geng’s research profile says he left Penn State in 2025.

Geng’s profile at the Chinese university says he was an “overseas project leader” for the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Chunhui Program — translated as the “Spring Sunshine” program.

The National Academies wrote that “the Spring Light Program, which brought Chinese researchers educated abroad back to visit China following the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, became Ministry of Education policy in 1996.” The National Academies said that “the Chinese government and the CCP established and expanded part-time programs for overseas scholars once it became apparent that these would be more attractive than full-time programs” — leading to the Thousand Talents Program.

The House Select Committee on the CCP said in 2025 that the Chinhui Plan “emphasizes leveraging overseas expertise to support the technological transformation and upgrading of large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises — entities that often serve as pillars of China’s strategic industrial base and are closely tied to national defense, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing sectors.”

The committee said “this objective underscores the Chunhui Plan’s role in accelerating domestic innovation through the targeted acquisition and application of foreign-developed technologies.”

Geng appears to currently be an associate professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The chairman of the House CCP committee said in 2024 that “Shanghai Jiao Tong University has helped drive China’s military modernization and intelligence capabilities, including by contributing to the development of nuclear weapons, carrier rockets, nuclear submarines, and fighter jets.”

Bill Evanina, the former head of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, warned in 2025 that the Chinese school “has historically been tied to the CCP’s intelligence and cyber hacking programs.”

Geng’s research involves advanced practical applications for machine learning.

Penn State touted Geng’s AI research work in 2025, noting it had been funded by the NSF and Energy Department.

Some of Geng’s work at Penn State “was conducted in part at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility” with the project noting that “Los Alamos National Laboratory” operates under an Energy Department contract.

FBI Director Kash Patel told Just the News on Friday that “this FBI, under this leadership, has prioritized the threat against it by the CCP against us, and we’ve taken swift action.”

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  Report: Chinese at elite U.S. schools were part of CCP program aimed at stealing U.S. technology, WorldTribune.com