China’s Communist Youth League Tried to Recruit Columbia Students for ‘Sustainability’ Junket

The Chinese Communist Party’s youth league quietly tried in April to recruit students at Columbia University to join a junket to China, according to documents I obtained. The trip, which promotes China’s green-technology sector and features a site visit to a “zero-carbon battery factory,” began today.

I haven’t been able to confirm that any students from Columbia ultimately applied for the weeklong program, which was slated to involve 30 U.S. citizens between the ages of 18 and 40 with an interest in sustainability. But the backing of the All-China Youth Federation (ACYF), an organization within the party’s sprawling united-front political-influence bureaucracy and controlled by the Communist Youth League of China, is an obvious red flag: This is a propaganda exercise.

“We are inviting young leaders from the United States to join us for a summer trip in China, to explore the topic of sustainability and international cooperation,” read an invitation message I reviewed. It said participants would “visit ecological sites including the Panda Research Base, the Three Gorges Dam, and the Yangtze River” and promised meetings with Chinese government officials.

An application form and trip itinerary circulated in an unofficial group chat for students at Columbia’s graduate School of International and Public Affairs in late April. As the university was grappling with a crisis brought on by an anti-Israel encampment that students set up on campus at the time, the ACYF junket invite went largely overlooked.

ACYF — which is controlled by the Central Committee of China’s Communist Youth League — offered to cover accommodations, transportation, and meals within China, though the participants would need to pay their way to the country. The itinerary shows that they will travel to Chengdu, Yibin, Wuhan, and, finally, Beijing. The organization did not respond to an email I sent requesting information on the composition of the American delegation.

It’s widely understood in national-security circles that party entities regularly offer American political leaders free trips as a way to bring them around to perspectives that Beijing wants them to hold. That’s why the State Department in 2020 ended Washington’s participation in several so-called “cultural exchanges” for members of Congress and their staffs. As then–secretary of state Mike Pompeo explained in the waning days of the Trump administration: “They provide carefully curated access to Chinese Communist Party officials, not to the Chinese people, who do not enjoy freedoms of speech and assembly.” Some state lawmakers continue to participate in such programs.

The party is clearly working to win over the next generation of American policy-makers. ACYF’s effort to reach Columbia students from the School of International and Public Affairs suggests that the point is to inculcate a pro-Beijing perspective in young Americans who could go on to hold positions of power and influence. None of the promotional materials I obtained indicate that this invitation was addressed exclusively to Columbia students. I believe that it’s more likely than not that ACYF distributed the application to other graduate schools and organizations.

John Dotson, the deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute think tank and an expert on Chinese political-influence operations, told me that he’s not surprised that this junket targets graduate students in a public-policy program. He sees it as part of Beijing’s broader “efforts at elite cultivation and cooptation,” which involves “a longer-term, multi-decade effort” to engage people who will be useful interlocutors in the future. Dotson, who told me that he’s skeptical of the party’s claimed commitment to environmental progress, said this theme is a “good narrative hook” with which to entice Americans.

ACYF’s role in coordinating such programs is relatively new, though. A different united-front organization, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, has for years run most of the party’s other educational exchanges for U.S. graduate students. In fact, it toured a group of Columbia students around China in January as part of Xi Jinping’s recent pledge to bring 50,000 Americans to China in the coming years. Dotson also said ACYF has been increasingly active in running exchange programs in Taiwan the previous two to three years, as Beijing has escalated its political-influence and interference work there.

If all went according to plan, the American participants arrived in Chengdu today to visit China’s State Key Laboratory of Rail Transit Vehicle, which the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology found is part of a state-run network of labs that produce research with national-security implications. They ended the first day with a “China-U.S. Friendship Gala” and will visit the Giant Panda Relocation and Conservation Ecological Demonstration Project and other sites tomorrow.

Following other site visits throughout the week, they’ll visit several Chinese government ministries and ACYF’s office on the second-to-last day of the program.

Washington is playing Whac-A-Mole as it tries to counter and expose the influence programs through which the party hopes to co-opt U.S. elite figures. With growing awareness of Beijing’s intentions, that’s getting slightly harder. Even so, in a society as open as ours, the party can often still reach at least some of the people it wants to influence.