UPenn Receives Mysterious $3M Donation From Chinese Firm

The donation from Xu Xeuqing, who has no apparent tie to the University of Pennsylvania but has close connections to the Chinese Communist Party according to documents reviewed by the Free Beacon, sparks concerns about the true origin of the money, especially as  China has been trying in recent years to buy influence on American campuses.

The University of Pennsylvania received $61 million in gifts and contracts from China between March 2017 and the end of 2019; a significant increase from the the previous four year period when it received $19 million from Chinese donors.

Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, explained that the purpose of China’s influence-buying on college campuses that it wants to both gain access to intellectual property of American scholars and improve its image in the United States.

Freeman added that it is difficult to determine whether Chinese businesses are "truly independent of the government. Even some of the contributions that we’re seeing ostensibly coming from Chinese businesses or Chinese charitable institutions, to some degree or another they are still connected to the Chinese government."