WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent Purdue President Mung Chiang and five other university presidents a letter this week, demanding information on students from China and their research on U.S. campuses.
“America’s student visa system has become a Trojan horse for Beijing,” said the letter released Wednesday, signed by Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar, R-2, the chairman of the House committee, “providing unrestricted access to our top research institutions and posing a direct threat to our national security.”
The letter said U.S. universities are beholden to the tuition from international students, particularly those from China, but that the presence of Chinese national students jeopardizes national security.
“The intelligence community has warned that American campuses are ‘soft targets’ for espionage and intellectual property theft. The U.S. Department of Justice has further raised concerns that ‘international students’ motives aren’t just to learn but to share that intelligence with foreign superpowers to see a competitive advantage,'” the letter said.
A Purdue spokesman has not responded to attempts for comment Friday morning.
China’s reaction
Beijing on Thursday demanded protections for Chinese students in the United States after the congressional panel asked the universities to hand over the detailed information on their students, according to the Associated Press.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Chinese students account for about one-fourth of all international students in the United States, according to AP, and that their activities have promoted “the economic prosperity and technological development of the U.S.”
“This is in the interest of both parties,” Mao told reporters at a daily briefing, AP said. “We urge the U.S. to stop overstretching the concept of national security, effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students, and not impose discriminatory restrictive measures on Chinese students.”
Citing a 2024 Harvard study, the U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP letter also said, “Only 25% of Chinese national graduate students intend to immigrate to the United States or another western country after completing their graduate programs.”
But of the four options in the Harvard study, “Chinese Graduate Students’ Experience of U.S. Higher Education Through Covid and U.S.-China Tensions,” about half of the respondents answered they were, “Likely to stay in the U.S. or another Western country for at least a few years after graduation, or for their first post-graduation job.”
The study interviewed just 45 postdoctoral or graduate students, .00015% of the 300,000 Chinese national students studying in the United States, according to the study.
Purdue has a population of 2,043 Chinese national students, according to spring 2025 online data from Purdue, about 3.52% of the university’s overall population. Of that, 1,340 are graduate students, 10.37% of the graduate student population.
At Purdue, international students pay only $310 dollars more than out-of-state students. The yearly tuition of an out-of-state student with eight or more credit hours is $28,794, compared to the $29,104 an international student in the same bracket would pay, according to Purdue bursar’s office data.
The presidents of Carnegie Mellon, Stanford University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California also received the same letter, according to a press release from the House Select Committee on the CCP. The letter did not state why these universities were chosen.
As of Friday morning, none of the other universities has publicly issued a statement. Moolenaar’s office also did not return comment.
What information does the committee seek?
The letter asks for information about the students that includes:
-
a list of all universities that Chinese national students previously attended;
-
their sources of tuition funding;
-
the type of research they are conducting;
-
a list of laboratories and research initiatives where they currently work;
-
a country-by-country breakdown of applicants, admittances, and enrollments at the university;
-
whether the university has policies to prevent foreign nationals from working on projects tied to U.S. government grants (e.g., Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation funded research);
-
restrictions on Chinese nationals enrolling in export-controlled coursework (e.g., advanced semiconductor engineering, quantum computing, AI, and aerospace engineering);
-
and what percentage of Chinese graduates from the university remain in the United States, and what percentage return to China.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Purdue University urged to release info on Chinese students by House
