In June, a stunning new report was released documenting an MBA program at Missouri State University that has trained over 1,500 high-ranking executives and government officials for China since 2001, including leaders of the country’s defense industry.
Isaac Stone Fish is the CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, “a business intelligence firm which quantifies corporate exposure to China, and helps companies and entities manage and reduce their China risk.” His firm authored the report. Stone Fish spoke with Liberty Nation News on how a Heartland America university became a finishing school for the top executive personnel of the Beijing communist regime. You can read the full report at the Strategy Risks website here.
Joe Schaeffer: Strategy Risks is a global geopolitical risk analysis and consulting firm that specializes on China. In June, it released an alarming report highlighting an especially shocking example of the dangerous ties between American universities and the Asian communist superpower regime. “For more than two decades, Missouri State University has operated a little-known MBA pipeline for Chinese state-owned enterprise executives, government officials, and Chinese defense contractors,” the report begins. Missouri State by 2018 had already trained more than 1,500 current and future managers for Chinese state-owned enterprises and government bodies. This program was still being touted by China as late as July 2024. So those numbers are now undoubtedly even higher. Here to talk to us more about that is Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and founder of Strategy Risks. Thank you so much for joining us, Isaac.
Isaac Stone Fish: Thanks for having me, Joe.
American Institutions and the China Connection
JS: Let’s start out with what jumps out right away. Future executives at Aviation Industry Corporation of China or AVIC, China’s largest state-owned aviation and defense conglomerate, were graduates of this program. AVIC is at the heart of the extensive Chinese military buildup of recent years that has placed a special focus on developing missiles to destroy US aircraft. What is an American university doing helping to train these people to be better business performers?
ISF: So, for the last several decades and really until about 2016-2018, the norm was for US institutions across the political spectrum and across the country to support the Chinese Communist Party – to train Communist Party officials, to partner with Communist Party institutions. And this was the way of the land. These were the norms. And this started shifting about a decade ago. And a lot of institutions, Missouri State being one of them, didn’t update themselves for the time. Again, not signaling them out. There’s a lot of universities and entities that have done this as well, but the normal discourse in the United States, vis-à-vis China, was, “Hey, we’re going to work to support the Chinese Communist Party.” Now, we look back on that in hindsight and think in many ways that’s pretty ridiculous, but that’s how it all was. And so Missouri state was just a little bit later to the party than most.
JS: And your report states that the Chinese Communist Party kept strict tabs on how the operation ran. They were the ones selecting the students, not Missouri State?
ISF: One thing we found pretty problematic from the research was Beijing and the party’s control over which students got to be part of this pipeline and which students they allowed to go. There were certain ideological factors required for the students to come into this program.
And so Beijing was picking a subset of young cadres and training them in US business norms and then many of them went back to China to work in standard enterprises and some went back to work for defense contractors as well.
JS: And US taxpayers were picking up a percentage of their tuition or costs?
ISF: That very much appears to be so. There’s this very unclear, confusing entity at the middle of this called IMEC. Which we hope Missouri State will soon release more information about what exactly that entity did. But at least one Chinese source said that about a quarter of the funding came from taxpayers and we’re looking forward to seeing from Missouri State how exactly this program was funded.
JS: So take me back. I guess you’ll be going back 20 years. You’re a business consulting expert. You specialize in business risk as it pertains to China. This would seem to be an incredibly risky venture for a US college to participate in. The national security concerns. You’re gonna draw oversight worries, investigations. But they dove in anyway. Was the Chinese money really that irresistible for a university like Missouri State 20-25 years ago?
ISF: So 20-25 years ago, the political and security considerations looked very, very different and there wasn’t the sense then that the Chinese Communist Party and China may dominate the US globally, may lead to a world where the US is not the pre-eminent superpower. There wasn’t nearly all the considerations about Beijing’s influence to the United States. And what happened was, later on AVIC got sanctioned, I think for the first time, in 2020. NUAA [Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics], one of the universities they partnered with, also started appearing on US government lists. And so it was really what happened over the last several years when it started to abut US sanctions that we wanted to focus on.
It’s also, I think, a really important story about how Beijing’s links to American universities aren’t even primarily at the Harvards and Yales or in the Northeast and in California. And this is really a countrywide issue.
JS: So, you said 2020 is when it started becoming a concern. Missouri State’s program started in 2001. We’re talking two decades of them just going about it with no problems?
ISF: Oh, [I didn’t say] it was only a concern in 2020. 2020 is when AVIC became sanctioned for the first time. So it was when it first became a sanctions concern. Certainly, there were national security and other concerns that predated AVIC’s listing on various US government lists.
JS: But we know the numbers of Chinese students studying at American colleges jumped significantly during the [Barack] Obama years. I think it tripled, maybe even more. But again, this program began in 2001 and it was humming well before Obama got into office. So was Missouri State ahead of the game here or were other colleges doing the same thing even before Obama got into office?
ISF: That’s a great question. A lot of other colleges were doing the same thing. And it’s a very difficult situation. It’s also really hard to talk about because on the one hand, we want the world’s best and brightest to come and study in America. And there are so many incredibly wonderful, thoughtful Chinese students who come here because, you know, they love America. They want to get to know America or they want to escape the system that they’re in.
On the other hand, along with that, you do have Chinese students who are informing on other Chinese students. You have Chinese students who are stealing IP. You have Chinese students who are party members and very ardent party members. And it’s a very difficult decision for universities. How do they handle this? To make matters even more complicated, so many Chinese students are forced to be pawns of Beijing by Beijing because Beijing has leverage over them in various ways. And so it’s hard to disentangle their nationality with the role they play in geopolitics.
And it’s unfortunate. One doesn’t want to put them in that position, but that’s the position that Beijing puts them in.
Change on the Horizon?
JS: So is there a change going on in American universities right now? It seems like they’ve been chastened, but there is a money factor here, right? They’re making money off of these students coming here. Do they want to reduce the number of Chinese students? Do they see a threat or would they like things to just keep going as usual?
ISF: You know, it’s a great question and we seem to be at some turning point, but I do not know which direction this is going to turn in. Sentiment of Americans towards China appears to be rising. There is a very real possibility that universities will turn towards more Chinese students rather than fewer. We don’t know what role China is going to play in the midterms or in the 2028 election. And it is really possible that these investigations don’t have the results that we want them to have, which is increased transparency and more focus on some of the national security concerns.
On the other hand, there may start being revelations of, say, secret People’s Liberation Army colonels who are working at universities, other roles that the Ministry of State Security is playing at universities, and we could see even more attention to that and more restrictions. It’s difficult to say.
JS: It reminds me of, I’ve written a couple articles about the culture of America, I guess in the universities but also in government. Mike Pompeo when he was [President Donald] Trump’s secretary of state pointed out that Republican and Democrat governors openly courted Chinese business. They wanted, they said “come to our state – aerospace, natural resources”… things with national security concerns. So it sounds like that same kind of culture was commonplace on America’s campuses at that same time.
ISF: Absolutely. There’s a striking disconnect between America’s governors, who tend to be much more open to engagement with the Chinese Communist Party, and America’s senators and congresspeople, who tend to be much more hawkish.
JS: Why would that be? They’re just looking for business in the state and they’re not thinking of the larger concerns?
ISF: Absolutely. The way a state grows, and, again, this is Republican and Democrat, matters much more usually to the re-election of governors than it does to senators. Senators can have more national security concerns. And, again, there’s plenty of exceptions on both sides but on the whole governors focus on trade and considerations with trade with China in a way that senators don’t need to. And so you’ll see a lot more United Front operations that engage governors and their staff than senators and their staff. I think the senators and congresspeople, but senators especially, have gotten more savvy to it.
JS: So how would you tie that into American universities then? Is it they’re just thinking about their world, their concerns, and they’re not thinking about the larger picture?
ISF: I think that’s definitely one piece of it. You know, especially American universities that take a lot of government research money. And they really need to be more thoughtful on what their ties are to China and the Chinese Communist Party. And our message is not, “hey, you have to decouple.” It’s manage your risks. Be thoughtful with this. Try to think through what the externalities are of your engagements so that you can make better decisions and make sure you’re taking care of your students. And in the case of Missouri State, we want people to be careful that they’re not accidentally training Chinese defense contractors.
JS: So I don’t know if this is a put you on the spot question or not, but how much national security damage do you think was done by programs like Missouri State, which was not an outlier? You’re saying it was more commonplace. Was the national security of the United States significantly affected by what was going on on America’s campuses over the last 25 years?
ISF: You know, it’s a hard question to answer until we come to the point when the US and China are at war and that’s something that I do believe will happen at some point. I don’t think when we look back on this period that we’ll see universities as the main culprit. I think we’re going to see a lot more with businesses and government. But it is very possible that cutting edge AI that Beijing can successfully use to weaponize the United States turns out to have been trained at a joint US-China lab or there’s a future bioweapon or a future cyber-weapon that does come from a US-China partnership.
Those things are very, very possible. And so I think this is a question that, you know, I’ll be able to answer, not to evade the question, I think it’s an important one, but a question I’ll be able to answer with hindsight.
JS: Last question then. You’re advising Missouri State University. You’ve taken them on as a client. What are you telling them about this program?
ISF: So, hypothetically, if Missouri State or a similar university like that were to hire me about this program, the first thing is how do you deal with what was contended in this report? What kind of information do you need to put out that shows that you behaved ethically? And if you didn’t, what have you done to clean up to make sure that mistakes you made in the past were dealt with, apologized for, and that you’re setting guardrails in place so that something like this doesn’t happen again.
A lot of these things are about compliance. A lot of them are about fundraising and making sure that people who are soliciting donors know where the money is coming from. A lot of them are about corporate capture and making sure that as an institution is partnered with the Chinese Communist Party, they understand the ways that can impact intellectual freedom. And a lot of it is also on the quality of the academic environment there.
So, how do you make sure that you’re providing the best value to Missouri State students? And what does it mean about having a program that has very different application requirements and lets in a certain type of student that may not be who Missouri State wants to be known for training. So a lot of questions like that that I think would be helpful to answer.
JS: But nothing criminal. There’s not… they won’t face any kind of criminal investigation over this… training Chinese defense contractors?
ISF: We did not see anything – and I’m not a lawyer and so definitely not something I can speak on – but to my untrained eye we didn’t see anything that was criminal.
JS: Okay. That was Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and founder of Strategy Risks. Thanks again for being with us. I appreciate it very much.
ISF: Thank you, Joe. Thanks for the time.
