The Russians tried to spread Communism in America, but the Chinese and Qatari are much more successful. It is easy to realize why. Opinion.
An executive order from Donald Trump requires transparency into foreign funding in American academic institutions to stop Chinese and Islamic influence. But for liberals and woke people, it is Trump who threatens the independence of American universities.
How much money are we talking about?
The Free Press reveals it.
According to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, shared exclusively with the Free Press, foreign donors have given U.S. universities the same amount in the last four years as they had in the previous 40. The study shows an explosion in foreign funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with $29 billion during that period.
Qatar and China are among the main sources of funding.
That $29 billion is more than double the total for the previous four years and represents half of the estimated $57.97 billion in all foreign funding since 1986, when the U.S. government began tracking it.
“The floodgates have opened during the Biden era,” said Joel Finkelstein, founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute. “This is not just a financial issue, it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are gaining influence on American campuses on an industrial scale.”
Beijing and Doha saw a huge opportunity during Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of the woke.
Qatar has been the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since research began in 1986, with $6.3 billion coming from the Gulf country. Qatari donations have increased significantly over the past four years. Nearly a third of Qatar’s donations, more than $2 billion, were given between 2021 and 2024.
The second-largest source of foreign funding is China. Chinese funding amounts to $5.6 billion and, like Qatar, Chinese donations have increased significantly over the past four years, with $2.3 billion from 2021 to 2024. China is the largest source of foreign donations to some of America’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Stanford.
Harvard received the most funding from foreign donors ($3.2 billion), followed by Cornell and Carnegie Mellon (each receiving $2.8 billion). “If ignorance is an epidemic, Harvard is Wuhan.” The lapidary sentence was made by the great comedian Bill Maher, after the support of the students of the famous Boston university for Hamas and the refusal of the university’s leaders to condemn the pogrom of October 7.
$13 billion from Arab regimes to American universities. Being surprised by the explosion of anti-Semitism and Islamism in the classrooms is at the very least ridiculous.
The other surprise is the $120 million that China and Qatar have given to Julliard, the world-renowned performing arts conservatory. For a school that trains Broadway actors and pianists, that’s an absolute stunner. And it raises a fundamental question: Why Juilliard?
Funding universities is one of the most effective ways for foreign governments to shape Western discourse. According to the 2025 Global Soft Power Index, China just overtook the United Kingdom to take second place globally in measuring global influence in culture and heritage, arts, and entertainment.
If China can establish its influence in a major laboratory for future Hollywood stars, directors and playwrights, it can shape the industry well before the projects reach the script stage. By funding programs, faculty, and scholarships, China ensures that tomorrow’s most influential artists are nurtured in an ideological framework favorable to Beijing.
Prevention, as they say, is better than cure.
China is not the only foreign power to gain influence over Western culture. Qatar has also made significant progress. The emir has long understood that culture and power go hand in hand. His investments are deliberate instruments of influence. Let us recall the case of Edwy Plenel, the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde who founded the super news site Mediapart, a militant intellectual in favor of political Islam. His book, “For Muslims,” was distributed in Arabic by the Qatari Ministry of Culture. Paid for and distributed.
Ruth Wisse writes in the Wall Street Journal that Harvard has become an “Islamist outpost”.
So how can we not think of Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross, the “Cambridge Five”, the network of English spies at the service of the Soviet Union? Kim Philby will die in exile in the Soviet Union, without ever regretting his betrayal: “I spent two years studying communism. It was only at the end of my stay at Cambridge that I made the final decision to dedicate my life to communism”.
Western universities, in the opposition between the democratic West and the totalitarian East, have always sided with the latter. Oxford and Cambridge were full of Moscow spies with long British coats, among the professors obviously, while in Paris the professors sympathized with the communists. And this well before 1968, when the universities became the breeding ground for Maoism (as they are today for Hamas).
The Englishman Anthony Glees has revealed the “grey area” of the German terrorist group Baader-Meinhof: “In 1977, the Federal Criminal Police Office of West Germany had a list of terrorists with the names of 4.7 million sympathizers, many of whom were university students”.
In France, Gallimard has just published “Stalin’s Conscience”, a great book of six hundred pages on Alexandre Kojève, the Russian philosopher who shaped the French intelligentsia, naturalized French in 1937, a cult professor of the philosophical and literary generation that dominated the post-war period: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Pierre Klossowski, André Breton, Jacques Lacan and others gathered in a small room at the Sorbonne every Monday at 5:30 PM to hear from Kojève, who was not only an agent of the Kremlin in Paris, but also an architect of the EU.
Kojève, grandson of Wassily Kandinsky, was also a high-ranking “homme d’influence” who chose the governance of the economy and the trade sector as his field of action. One of the fathers of the European Union, Kojève had entered the French Ministry of Finance in 1948, was secretary of the OECD (Organization for European Economic Cooperation), advisor to the French government in the creation of the ECSC, the first embryo of the EEC, and negotiator of world trade agreements such as the GATT (General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade). With his ideas and his dialectic methods he shaped the minds and strategies of the French high administration.
But there is a big difference: during Kojève’s Cold War, neither Moscow nor Beijing had the means and the ability to finance our universities, they had to recruit sympathizers from among students and professors, while today from Doha to Beijing there is a river of money pouring into our universities and public administration. It will always be easier to pay them than to convince them.
The worm has always been in the fruit: the idea, enclosed in high culture, that the West deserves to be swept away.
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist at Il Foglio who writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.An executive order from Donald Trump requires transparency into foreign funding in American academic institutions to stop Chinese and Islamic influence. But for liberals and woke people, it is Trump who threatens the independence of American universities.
How much money are we talking about?
The Free Press reveals it.
According to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, shared exclusively with the Free Press, foreign donors have given U.S. universities the same amount in the last four years as they had in the previous 40. The study shows an explosion in foreign funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with $29 billion during that period.
Qatar and China are among the main sources of funding.
That $29 billion is more than double the total for the previous four years and represents half of the estimated $57.97 billion in all foreign funding since 1986, when the U.S. government began tracking it.
“The floodgates have opened during the Biden era,” said Joel Finkelstein, founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute. “This is not just a financial issue, it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are gaining influence on American campuses on an industrial scale.”
Beijing and Doha saw a huge opportunity during Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of the woke.
Qatar has been the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since research began in 1986, with $6.3 billion coming from the Gulf country. Qatari donations have increased significantly over the past four years. Nearly a third of Qatar’s donations, more than $2 billion, were given between 2021 and 2024.
The second-largest source of foreign funding is China. Chinese funding amounts to $5.6 billion and, like Qatar, Chinese donations have increased significantly over the past four years, with $2.3 billion from 2021 to 2024. China is the largest source of foreign donations to some of America’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Stanford.
Harvard received the most funding from foreign donors ($3.2 billion), followed by Cornell and Carnegie Mellon (each receiving $2.8 billion). “If ignorance is an epidemic, Harvard is Wuhan.” The lapidary sentence was made by the great comedian Bill Maher, after the support of the students of the famous Boston university for Hamas and the refusal of the university’s leaders to condemn the pogrom of October 7.
$13 billion from Arab regimes to American universities. Being surprised by the explosion of anti-Semitism and Islamism in the classrooms is at the very least ridiculous.
The other surprise is the $120 million that China and Qatar have given to Julliard, the world-renowned performing arts conservatory. For a school that trains Broadway actors and pianists, that’s an absolute stunner. And it raises a fundamental question: Why Juilliard?
Funding universities is one of the most effective ways for foreign governments to shape Western discourse. According to the 2025 Global Soft Power Index, China just overtook the United Kingdom to take second place globally in measuring global influence in culture and heritage, arts, and entertainment.
If China can establish its influence in a major laboratory for future Hollywood stars, directors and playwrights, it can shape the industry well before the projects reach the script stage. By funding programs, faculty, and scholarships, China ensures that tomorrow’s most influential artists are nurtured in an ideological framework favorable to Beijing.
Prevention, as they say, is better than cure.
China is not the only foreign power to gain influence over Western culture. Qatar has also made significant progress. The emir has long understood that culture and power go hand in hand. His investments are deliberate instruments of influence. Let us recall the case of Edwy Plenel, the former editor-in-chief of Le Monde who founded the super news site Mediapart, a militant intellectual in favor of political Islam. His book, “For Muslims,” was distributed in Arabic by the Qatari Ministry of Culture. Paid for and distributed.
Ruth Wisse writes in the Wall Street Journal that Harvard has become an “Islamist outpost”.
So how can we not think of Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross, the “Cambridge Five”, the network of English spies at the service of the Soviet Union? Kim Philby will die in exile in the Soviet Union, without ever regretting his betrayal: “I spent two years studying communism. It was only at the end of my stay at Cambridge that I made the final decision to dedicate my life to communism”.
Western universities, in the opposition between the democratic West and the totalitarian East, have always sided with the latter. Oxford and Cambridge were full of Moscow spies with long British coats, among the professors obviously, while in Paris the professors sympathized with the communists. And this well before 1968, when the universities became the breeding ground for Maoism (as they are today for Hamas).
The Englishman Anthony Glees has revealed the “grey area” of the German terrorist group Baader-Meinhof: “In 1977, the Federal Criminal Police Office of West Germany had a list of terrorists with the names of 4.7 million sympathizers, many of whom were university students”.
In France, Gallimard has just published “Stalin’s Conscience”, a great book of six hundred pages on Alexandre Kojève, the Russian philosopher who shaped the French intelligentsia, naturalized French in 1937, a cult professor of the philosophical and literary generation that dominated the post-war period: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Pierre Klossowski, André Breton, Jacques Lacan and others gathered in a small room at the Sorbonne every Monday at 5:30 PM to hear from Kojève, who was not only an agent of the Kremlin in Paris, but also an architect of the EU.
Kojève, grandson of Wassily Kandinsky, was also a high-ranking “homme d’influence” who chose the governance of the economy and the trade sector as his field of action. One of the fathers of the European Union, Kojève had entered the French Ministry of Finance in 1948, was secretary of the OECD (Organization for European Economic Cooperation), advisor to the French government in the creation of the ECSC, the first embryo of the EEC, and negotiator of world trade agreements such as the GATT (General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade). With his ideas and his dialectic methods he shaped the minds and strategies of the French high administration.
But there is a big difference: during Kojève’s Cold War, neither Moscow nor Beijing had the means and the ability to finance our universities, they had to recruit sympathizers from among students and professors, while today from Doha to Beijing there is a river of money pouring into our universities and public administration. It will always be easier to pay them than to convince them.
The worm has always been in the fruit: the idea, enclosed in high culture, that the West deserves to be swept away.
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist at Il Foglio who writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
