Xi’s Invitation to American Students Comes with Dangerous Strings Attached

A t his White House welcoming ceremony last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would invite 100,000 young Americans to study there over the course of five years. Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute wrote on X that the program is “clearly intended to indoctrinate young Americans in China,” and a column in The Hill warned of hostage-taking and stolen lab research. These worries are reasonable but may never materialize. As for indoctrination, many Americans who have lived in China come home more critical of Beijing than when they left; Matt Pottinger reported from China for seven years before helping shape the first Trump administration’s China policy.

Our concern should be the data these students will unwittingly hand over through their phones. Beijing will likely keep it for years and use it as it pleases. In practice, nearly every student will need WeChat, which New York University Shanghai’s IT guide calls “an essential communication and payment platform in China.” Some programs require it outright: A Tsinghua summer program tells students to install the app and join its WeChat group before arrival because “almost all course materials and information” go out through it. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Gmail are blocked in China, and few people carry cash, so students use WeChat for cabs, meals, and class chats.

In 2024, after reverse-engineering the proprietary protocol of Tencent, WeChat’s Chinese owner, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab confirmed that WeChat lacks end-to-end encryption and that “WeChat’s servers can and do decrypt and read each transmitted message.” A 2023 Citizen Lab study found that activity in WeChat’s mini programs — used for everything from doctor visits to campus paperwork — is automatically logged and sent to Tencent, with no way to opt out.

Under Article 28 of China’s Cybersecurity Law, network operators must provide “technical support and assistance” to public and state security organs, and Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law requires every organization to assist state intelligence work and keep it secret. Tencent is bound by both. China’s police, a term covering both public security and state security agencies, need no judge’s warrant to demand data, and companies have no formal way to refuse.

In 2019, Gao Zhigang of Taiyuan forwarded a video to a friend in the United States and was jailed, sentenced to ten months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Radio Free Asia, which reviewed the case file, reported that documents in the evidence showed China’s internet regulator and the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department monitoring WeChat chats directly. Gao said he had deleted the video right after sending it and that the police screenshots could not have come from his phone. The chat he deleted still ended up in court as evidence.

Tencent’s help center says an account tied to a mainland phone number counts as a Weixin account, the domestic version of WeChat, and is subject to Chinese terms and privacy rules. Students usually buy a real-name-registered Chinese SIM card in their first week, and NYU Shanghai tells those who buy one through the university to “register for both WeChat and Alipay on-site before leaving,” which puts them on Weixin from day one.

Anything beyond monitored chat, starting with payments, requires uploading a passport and scanning one’s face. So does buying the SIM card, under a December 2019 rule, and at most of China’s top universities students scan their faces again at campus gates, dorms, and libraries.

The Citizen Lab has found that accounts first registered with a mainland number stay under China’s censorship rules even after switching to a foreign number, so a U.S. number back home does little. Most students keep WeChat anyway, since it is often their only link to friends and host families in China.

The State Department’s China travel advisory tells Americans using Chinese apps to assume China’s security services can read their messages “even when you are in another country, including the United States.” It adds that China “has detained people even when they sent these messages outside of China.”

Young Americans willing to learn Chinese and live in China are the ones most likely, a decade from now, to work on China at the State Department, in intelligence and the military, on Capitol Hill, and in newsrooms. By the time they are 20, Beijing could have a file on each of them — a passport-verified identity, a face, the people they met, where they went, what they bought, and what they said in private. As long as they use WeChat, even once they’re back in the U.S., the file keeps growing. That standing access is the most dangerous part, since how Beijing might use it later is hard to predict.

In 2004, Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Michigan student who had studied in Shanghai, answered an ad for papers on U.S.–China relations. Chinese intelligence officers cultivated him, paid him more than $70,000, and steered him to apply to the State Department and the CIA. When he was found out, he got four years in prison, and the FBI turned his case into a cautionary film for students abroad. Finding and developing a Shriver once took time, ads, and dinners; through WeChat, the Ministry of State Security can now size up these students and spot the next one with little effort.

In the 2018–19 academic year, 11,639 American students earned credit in China; in 2023–24, only 1,749 did. Those still willing to go deserve protection, as do the Chinese classmates on the other end of their chats, who face greater danger. Guarding against Beijing should not mean treating Chinese Americans or Chinese students here as suspects. The Justice Department’s China Initiative against espionage and technology theft, launched in 2018, ended up targeting scholars of Chinese descent and was shut down in 2022.

A spare phone protects only what is on a student’s regular one, since the WeChat account and contacts live on Tencent’s servers. Deleting the account at home retrieves no uploaded records or face data and cuts the student off from friends in China. Students can do little else on their own; the rest falls to Washington.

The simplest step is for the State Department to tell families the truth by moving its warning about Chinese apps off a little-read web page and into every exchange program’s pre-departure material. A parents’ group counts about 80 universities and more than 20 K-12 schools in Beijing-funded programs, and every family involved should see that warning before a student leaves.

Reining in WeChat at home will be harder but is necessary. Trump’s August 2020 ban on the app was blocked by a federal judge on free-speech grounds after users sued, and Biden later revoked it. Congress has since supplied a sturdier tool: the 2024 law aimed at TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025, lets the president designate foreign-adversary-controlled apps with more than a million monthly U.S. users by determining that they pose a significant threat to national security. Trump should make that determination for WeChat and force Tencent to sell its U.S. business or leave the American market. Either outcome would limit Beijing’s free hand with Americans’ data.

At the White House, Xi said the hope of U.S.–China relations lies with the people and its future with the young. Beijing takes that line seriously — seriously enough that the United States had to stop recruiting exchange participants in China after Chinese authorities harassed, threatened, and in some cases arrested them. As up to 100,000 young Americans arrive over the next five years, Beijing will presumably take what is on their phones just as seriously. Washington should act before the first of them board their flights.