INVESTIGATION: Stanford Receives Chinese State-linked Donations

A whistleblower has provided the non-public foreign funding disclosures of Stanford University to the Stanford Review. For the first time, the public will have access to the names of Chinese state-backed entities and individuals funding Stanford.

Stanford University accepted at least $3 million in 2025 from a donor whose name it disclosed as "Chen Yuan," of China, recorded as a restricted gift for directed research at the Hoover Institution. The disclosure does not identify which "Chen Yuan" made the gift. But the name, nationality, and the financial capacity implied by the gift most closely match Chen Yuan, the chairman of the China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC), who has extensive documented ties to Stanford spanning two generations of his family.

U.S. government reporting describes CAIFC as subordinate to the Liaison Bureau of the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organ responsible for political warfare and influence operations. A 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identified CAIFC as part of the CCP's overseas influence apparatus. It noted the group's involvement in intelligence collection and influence activities inside the United States.

Chen Yuan served as Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 2013 to 2018. He is the oldest son of former Vice Premier Chen Yun. Before chairing CAIFC, he served as president of the state-owned China Development Bank from 1998 to 2013, turning it into one of the world's largest policy lenders. Hoover also houses the diaries of Mao Zedong’s former secretary, Li Rui. The diaries contain commentary on senior CCP leaders, including Chen Yun and his family. 

Chen Yuan’s sister, Chen Weili (陈伟力), spent two years at Stanford as a visiting scholar earlier in her career. Chen Yuan's son, Xiaoxin Chen (陈晓欣), attended Stanford and donated $1,020,000 to the university in 2024. Members of the Chen family appear in Stanford records both as students and donors.

Stanford declined to provide additional information. Responding on behalf of External Relations and the Office of Development, a university representative said it is Stanford's longstanding practice not to disclose donor names or gift details without the donor's authorization. The representative said Stanford conducts rigorous due diligence on all gifts, with an additional layer of scrutiny for international ones.

A restricted gift of this kind works as a research contract. The funds go to a named Hoover researcher or project rather than to the university unconditionally. The disclosure appears in filings made under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.

The money was routed through the San Francisco law firm Adler & Colvin. No other reported donation in the disclosures was structured this way. Every other donor listed a home or company address. Routing a foreign gift through a legal intermediary can make it difficult to verify the donor's true identity, as it obscures the funds' true source.

The Hoover Institution shapes U.S. geopolitical discourse and participates in national research security work, including the congressionally authorized SECURE programs. Its scholars have led research on Beijing's global influence campaigns, including the program on China's Global Sharp Power (now called "US, China, and the World"), which examines how the CCP projects political influence through academic partnerships and financial engagement abroad. The SECURE program, which oversees $67 million in taxpayer funds, has faced growing scrutiny from Washington lately. The House Select Committee on the CCP is pressing the National Science Foundation to pause the program and review the University of Washington and Texas A&M after finding that they have been collaborating with Chinese military-linked entities. 

Stanford works with the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and federally funded research programs. The Hoover Institution participates in national research security initiatives, including the SECURE program and the NSF-funded SECURE Analytics program. At the same time, Stanford takes millions of dollars from Chinese state-linked companies and elites connected to the United Front Work Department, the CCP body that co-opts and influences groups outside the Party. U.S. government reports tie these networks to the CCP's influence apparatus.

Stanford has accepted millions of dollars in gifts and research contracts from Chinese companies and political entities tied to Beijing's state and military-industrial system, according to the disclosures. In some cases, the donations coincide with collaborations involving U.S. government-funded research. The examples below are drawn from Stanford's disclosures.

Millions from Chinese State-Linked Entities

• BOE Technology Group provided $254,000 in contracts in 2019 for research on high-conductivity stretchable electrode arrays. BOE is a Chinese state-subsidized manufacturer that the House Select Committee on the CCP says was founded in 1993 as a military and defense supplier and operates as a subcontractor for the PLA. In 2026, a federal jury found that BOE had infringed U.S. patents.
• Huawei Technologies provided $250,000 in contracts and gifts from 2019 to 2020, after the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security placed it on the Entity List. The purpose was not specified.
• State Grid Corporation of China provided $1.5 million in contracts and gifts in 2019 to fund fellowships for graduate and postdoctoral scholars from China conducting energy research.
• The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) awarded $1.1 million in contracts in 2018 to a Stanford principal investigator for the Ali CMB Polarization Telescope (AliCPT-1), the first stage of a Sino-U.S. joint project led by CAS's Institute of High Energy Physics. U.S. participants include Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The federally run National Institute of Standards and Technology designed and fabricated the telescope's superconducting detector arrays, which Stanford integrated into the receiver before the components were shipped to Tibet.
• China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) provided $380,000 in contracts from 2023 to 2026 for a Stanford principal investigator studying cement integrity for long-term hydrogen storage.
• China National Technical Import & Export Corporation provided $619,000 in contracts in 2022. The purpose was not specified.
• The Ma Huateng Foundation provided $5.45 million in contracts in 2019. The purpose was not specified.
• Jingdong Group (JD.com) provided $3.9 million in contracts and gifts from 2018 to 2021. The purpose was not specified.
• Dowson Tong (汤道生), president of Tencent's Cloud and Smart Industries Group, gave $800,000 from 2024 to 2025 to support a faculty member's research in the School of Engineering and the Hong Kong/Stanford University Charitable Trust.
• Tencent Charity Foundation Limited awarded $441,000 in contracts and gifts in 2016 to support Professor Leskovec's work on the diffusion of information.
• Guangdong Qitian Institute awarded $4.75 million in contracts from 2019 to 2023 to a Stanford principal investigator developing a curriculum to support the launch of QiTian School.
• Midea Group provided $680,000 in contracts in 2024. The purpose was not specified.
• Weichai Power provided $1 million in contracts in 2018 for executive education lectures at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
• The Beijing Institute of Collaborative Innovation (BICI) provided $984,000 in contracts from 2020 to 2021. The purpose was not specified. The Beijing Municipal Government established BICI.

Gifts from CCP-Connected Political Elites

Stanford's disclosures also show large gifts from individuals who have held formal roles in CCP-affiliated political bodies:

• William Ding, CEO of NetEase, gave $25.1 million from 2020 to 2021. Ding served as a Representative of the 11th Guangdong Provincial People's Congress and sits on the 13th CPPCC.
• Diana Chen, CEO of Pioneer Group Holdings, gave $6.2 million in 2023. Chen has served on the Beijing Committee of the 11th, 12th, and 13th CPPCC and is an Executive Member of the China Overseas Friendship Association (COFA), which is subordinate to the United Front Work Department of the CCP.
• C. C. Tung and Harriet W. Tung gave $3 million from 2020 to 2024. C. C. Tung (Tung Chee-chen) is the Governor of the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), supervised by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). In July 2022, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned state and local leaders that the CPAFFC and the United Front Work Department may exploit sister-city agreements to advance Beijing's interests. A Jamestown Foundation analysis characterized CUSEF as a vehicle for United Front "lobbying laundering."

The money funds faculty research, professorships, fellowships, and new labs across engineering, medicine, business, and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Many contracts name a specific Stanford faculty member working in AI, robotics, semiconductors, and other emerging technologies. Other gifts pay for executive education for Chinese industry leaders and fellowships for Chinese graduate students in energy and technology.

Many of these fields are designated critical technology areas by both Washington and Beijing. Through industrial strategies such as Made in China 2025 and military-civil fusion, the PRC has set out to dominate these sectors and reduce its reliance on foreign technology. Under PRC law and party policy, scientific innovation is expected to serve state-directed strategic objectives rather than open inquiry alone. That expectation complicates any framing of such funding as undertaken solely to advance science. Contracted research and restricted gifts direct funds to specific researchers and projects, raising the question of who ultimately benefits.

Stanford reports foreign gifts and contracts as required by federal law, though it does not always disclose the source of the funds. What the disclosures show is a university that studies Chinese influence operations while accepting money from the people who run them. Without a transparency mechanism for foreign gifts and contracts, the public has no way to know which researchers are funded by whom, or to what end.

Author's Note

Public filings include donation amounts. A whistleblower has provided the names of private counterparties.

This article is the third in a series covering the Chinese Communist Party's influence at Stanford. To stay informed as details emerge, consider subscribing to the Stanford Review. If you have any relevant information about this topic, send it to investigations@stanfordreview.org. To support our work, please donate here.