WTH: Chinese Spies Have Infiltrated Stanford. The Stanford Review’s Elsa Johnson and Garret Molloy Explain
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
China’s Ministry of State Security has infiltrated and is conducting espionage at all levels of Stanford University. By law, all Chinese nationals are required to report back to the Chinese Communist Party on their research and daily activities when asked. Sometimes this spying is voluntary and conducted by those who wish to see America fall behind in the global tech race. Other times, Chinese nationals are coerced into spying on their school, friends, and teachers through transnational repression. How can universities and Congress work together to prevent Chinese espionage? And how is the Chinese government buying influence in American universities and American society writ large?
Elsa Johnson is the managing editor of the Stanford Review and a sophomore studying international relations and East Asian studies.
Garret Molloy is a staff writer and the business manager of the Stanford Review. He is a sophomore studying Hayek, economic history, and libertarian thought.
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Read Elsa and Garret's reporting here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.4 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.2 | What is going on? |
| 0:19.6 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:28.9 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletga. |
| 0:30.6 | And I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:31.7 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.1 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.2 | Mark, what the hell's going on? |
| 0:36.8 | What the hell is going on is the, what the hell's going on? What the hell is going on is the |
| 0:38.5 | Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated Stanford University and we've got the deets. |
| 0:43.5 | Dumb, dumb, dumb. We've got two young editors at the Stanford Review, which is the conservative |
| 0:50.3 | newspaper at Stanford University, which is a great institution. They are sophomores, |
| 0:55.7 | and they did an investigation that could rival anything that the Washington Post or the New York Times |
| 1:01.5 | has done, and probably is something that both the Washington Post and the New York Times should have done, |
... |
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