Data is still data, even if it makes us uncomfortable. @TomCottonAR is right, at present, Chinese nationals should not be trained on our weapon systems or educated in our engineering institutions to bring that information back to China to ultimately use against us. @IWF pic.twitter.com/3xLxou9JG5
— Taylor Hathorn (@TaylorHathorn) February 7, 2026
How do we stop this transnational repression by the CCP?
First and foremost, you have to call a spade a spade. You have to call it out when you see it. I wrote an article recently about the number of students that come into the United States from China to study here and the fact that they are focusing on engineering fields and the fact that they're focusing on AI fields and they are getting that training in the United States and taking it back to China . . . . "Hybrid Warfare, Student Visas, and Chinas Trojan Horse," Taylor Hathorn, Townhall, September 27, 2025.
Economic espionage cases committed by Chinese Nationals have gone up 1300% in the last decade. I mean you've got trade best secret cases happening in the United States, 60% of which are attributed to the CCP. And so the data is there and it shows it. It shows that we are educating these students and employing these students and they are taking what they're learning here and using it against us in the United States. I need to be very clear that I am not vilifying all Chinese students. I do not think that is a problem here. But we need to create a better awareness pipeline to understand where the students' allegiance are. And I think the reality is people don't understand that when many of these students come here from China they are given a very strict out processing from China interview and an in-processing interview every single time they come home to make sure that they have not been too heavily influenced by the United States. To date, there are nearly a quarter of a million Chinese students studying at universities inside the United States, and we have less than a thousand American students studying inside of China. And China has great universities too, so it makes you wonder, why that tactic? Why is that being implemented and not the other way around if it really was a shared partnership among education institutions?
