Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Marietta, Ohio (population: 14,053), oozes small-town hospitality. Former mayor Michael “Moon” Mullen, a Marietta alumnus and bluegrass musician, hosts UIR students every summer. Once, at the downtown pizzeria Mullen owns, he and a UIR coed crooned a folk ballad together. Another time, he invited the Chinese students to his home for a cookout.

  “It was a night in the life of an American family, what we do for fun, we get together with friends, sit around the campfire, play our guitars,” Mullen says. “I give them authenticity. This is Middle America, simpler, slower, the life that I love. The more they feel welcome and at home here, the more they’ll come back. It’s good for the economy, good for cultural exchange.”

  Mullen is fully aware that international students have a “huge impact” on the college’s bottom line. With only a $71.3 million endowment in 2015, less than a tenth of Ohio competitor Denison University’s $797.1 million (Denison has about twice as many students), Marietta relies on tuition. International students usually pay the sticker price, or close to it, while domestic students receive more financial aid.

  With a well-regarded petroleum engineering program, Marietta attracts a sizable Middle Eastern contingent, including 58 Kuwaitis in 2015. But they’re outnumbered by Chinese enrollment, which peaked at 144 in both 2011 and 2012, when it comprised about 10 percent of the student body. That’s a high proportion, especially for an obscure liberal arts college; Chinese families tend to aspire to brand-name schools, like the Ivy Leagues and large public universities. Nor is Marietta a bargain: for years, it has required Chinese students to pay fifty thousand dollars up front, even before setting foot on campus.

  “They’re the lifeline of the college,” Luding Tong, a professor of Chinese language and director of Marietta’s Asian studies program, told me. “They’re the ATM machine.”

  * * *

  LIVING UP TO its team name, the “Pioneers,” Marietta was one of the first liberal arts colleges to take advantage of China’s opening to the West after the Cultural Revolution. Marietta first gained a toehold in 1985, when the late professor of economics Wen-Yu Cheng arranged a faculty exchange with the Sichuan Institute of Finance and Economics (now Southwestern University of Finance and Economics) in his native city of Chengdu. As that relationship fizzled in the wake of China’s massacre of student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, a princeling arrived at Marietta who would establish a more durable and lucrative bond with China’s spy university.

  Marietta received a U.S. Department of Education grant for a tenure-track position teaching both Chinese language and political science. From a handful of candidates, it chose Xiaoxiong Yi, a doctoral student at American University in Washington, D.C.

  Yi proved to be a dynamic teacher, and was awarded tenure in 1995. Michael Taylor, a management professor whose office was across the hall from Yi’s classroom, occasionally sat in on his classes. “He was as good as I’ve seen,” Taylor told me. “He really knows his subject, really listens to his students. He could get them involved. They were asking questions all the time. I wanted to see how he got that much engagement from U.S. students who are taking the course because they need a course in international stuff to graduate. He had a tremendous following of American students. They understood that he cared about what they had to say.”

  Gradually, word spread at Marietta about Yi’s lofty background. His father, Yi Lirong, an early member of the Chinese Communist Party and comrade of Mao Zedong, became labor minister when Mao took power in 1949, the same year that UIR was founded. Xiaoxiong Yi grew up in a compound for senior leaders and their families in Beijing, where children “were groomed to become China’s ruling elite.” Like so many of his brethren, Yi Lirong fell from favor during the Cultural Revolution and was imprisoned for a decade. Tainted by his father’s downfall, Xiaoxiong Yi also served time, and spent years as a fugitive in the countryside.

  When Yi Lirong was rehabilitated, his family moved to a housing complex where current Chinese president Xi Jinping, son of another prominent official who had been purged and pardoned, lived across the hall. Xiaoxiong Yi and Xi Jinping became friends and talked almost every day for five years. While Xi Jinping embarked on a political career, Xiaoxiong Yi “descended into the pursuit of romantic relationships, drink, movies and Western literature,” and then left China to pursue graduate studies in the United States. In 1987, Xi Jinping visited Xiaoxiong Yi in Washington, D.C.

  At Marietta, Yi shared a coffeepot with a colleague, and the two men often chatted over java about opportunities for the college in China. Eventually, Yi approached the administration and offered to travel back and forth to China and bring in a few children from families that he knew there.

  There was one caveat. At the time, U.S. colleges could only recruit in China if they had a tie-in with a local university. Yi had one in mind—the University of International Relations.

  “My understanding is that there was a faculty member at UIR who had a pretty good personal relationship with Xiaoxiong,” Jeremy Wang told me. “It evolved into an institutional relationship. We started to use UIR as a recruiting agent.”

  Given Yi’s background, he must have known about UIR’s affiliation with the security ministry. It’s likely that Yi, who declined to be interviewed for this book, recognized and acted upon a mutual interest: Marietta’s desire for diversity and revenue, and UIR’s for credibility and firsthand experience of American culture.

  Peter Mattis, the Jamestown Foundation expert on Chinese espionage, speculated that the security officials overseeing UIR trusted Yi because they were familiar with his father. “In the MSS, if you want to get promoted, you have to be the son or daughter of someone,” he says. “They believe that breeds loyalty and people who understand the system.” Yi “may go back and say to MSS, ‘There’s this kind of opportunity, why don’t we put something together?’”

  Yi also cultivated U.S. Department of State contacts, which helped in obtaining visas for Chinese students. “My impression is that Xiaoxiong does have connections with the State Department,” a Marietta colleague told me. “They value him very much as an informed person. I know he has friends there who often take his advice.”

  UIR began supplying prospective students with information about Marietta and steering them there. According to Tong, Marietta paid UIR at least $1,000 for each enrollee. One UIR administrator who had a high-ranking relative in Inner Mongolia helped Marietta connect with students there.

  The first group of a dozen Chinese students came to Marietta in 1995. UIR and Yi recruited all of them except Jeremy Wang, who transferred to Marietta for his senior year from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. In the early years, Yi often tapped China’s premier families. He He Li, who attended Marietta in 1997–98, was the son of Li Zhaoxing, then China’s ambassador to the United States and later its foreign minister. Li Zhaoxing delivered Marietta’s commencement address in 1998 and received an honorary degree.

  Initially, the arrangement with UIR bothered some Marietta professors. “A lot of faculty questioned this,” Tong told me. “Why we want to do it with a spy school? There was no answer. Then, all those years go by, we need the income from the Chinese students, it became a reality.”

  Michael Taylor, the management professor, recalled the early discussions. “I was told, whatever State Security spy training was being done, wasn’t being done there,” he said. UIR “was still basically owned and operated by State Security, because institutions in China don’t just give up and say, ‘We’ll turn this over to the education ministry.’ In China, the education ministry was the weakest link. They had the least money to spare. Nobody wanted to hand over their school, with the buildings and professors, whatever clout you had, to the education ministry.”

  In the college leadership’s view, the benefits—financial and otherwise—outweighed the risks. As I interviewed them, I was continually taken aback by how easily most Marietta administrators, past and present, rationalized the college’
s connection to China’s spy university. “I didn’t have misgivings,” Larry Wilson, Marietta’s president from 1995 to 2000, told me. “We certainly talked about it, what were the implications of it. Our feeling was, students coming to the U.S. would learn about our country in very positive ways. Then, when they went home, they would bring positive aspects about America back to China.

  “Did we have any students who were working for the Chinese government? If we did, we didn’t know it. Of course, they wouldn’t want us to know it.”

  UIR’s budding relationship with Marietta raised eyebrows at the American embassy in Beijing. In November 2002, the embassy sent a four-page cable, marked “secret” and “priority” and titled “China’s MSS Training School Begins to Seek ‘Real World’ Contacts,” to the secretary of state in Washington, D.C. It copied the American consulates in Shanghai, Shenyang, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong; the Taipei office of the American Institute in Taiwan, which represents the U.S. government; the U.S. embassies in Tokyo and Seoul; and the commander in chief and joint intelligence center of the U.S. Pacific Command, based in Honolulu. In response to my 2015 public records request, the State Department supplied a summary of the document, though it withheld the body, which it said was classified.

  “Beijing’s University of International Relations, the Ministry of State Security’s elite institute for preparing its new recruits, is seeking ‘exchange agreements’ with a number of overseas institutions of higher learning,” the cable stated. “The decision to pursue this route, which is being pushed within the UIR by students and within the ministry by ‘progressive’ young technocrats, is still being hotly debated. Nonetheless, UIR’s president has already concluded an agreement in the United States with Marietta College in Ohio, which so far has for the first time allowed UIR professors ‘real world’ opportunities to teach for short stints at Marietta.”

  * * *

  AS MORE CHINESE high school seniors applied to Marietta, the college streamlined the process. It opened a Beijing office, where Yi could meet students and parents and help with visas and other concerns. Eventually he gave up teaching and stayed in China almost year-round, in part for family reasons. His father died in 1997 at the age of ninety-nine, but his mother was still living there. “He was getting worn to a frazzle” doing two jobs and commuting to China, Taylor told me.

  From his perch in Beijing, Yi controlled Marietta’s China operations. Unlike his counterparts at branch campuses of other U.S. universities, he reported to the president, rather than to the vice president for enrollment management or director of admission, according to former staff members. At times he relaxed Marietta’s usual academic standards. The result, according to his critics at the college, was letting in some Chinese students who weren’t ready or who lacked English fluency.

  For example, in other foreign countries, Marietta applicants had to pass the standard English-proficiency exam, the College Board’s Test of English as a Foreign Language. Although Professor Janie Rees-Miller, Marietta’s director of English as a second language, recommended requiring the TOEFL in China as well, Yi overruled her. Instead, Rees-Miller designed Marietta’s own English test. It’s not as accurate as the TOEFL, but “it’s better than nothing for damn sure,” she told me. While the TOEFL costs $153 and lasts four hours, Marietta’s exam is free and takes half the time. The college’s admissions director would fly to China to proctor the exam, which was given in a UIR conference room, and interview prospects; he could accept or reject them on the spot. Marietta awarded small stipends to its better Chinese applicants, who relished not only the financial savings but also the prestige of a merit scholarship.

  Although their tuition was important to the college, former admission dean Jason Turley didn’t feel pressure to accept Chinese applicants, he told me. “Every trip I made, there were students who didn’t get in,” he said. “Their speaking was not adequate, and they were denied.… From the president to the CFO, there was never an implication, ‘Make sure you bring in more.’ It was, ‘If you’re going to accept them, they’d better be good.’”

  Yi raised Marietta’s profile in China. “Xiaoxiong liked taking the president and the provost over and squiring them around, wining and dining and introducing them to bigwigs,” one former administrator recalled. “He’s very big on politicking and relationship building.”

  Of the dozen Chinese students whom I interviewed at Marietta in April 2016, Yi had personally recruited almost all of them, including several through UIR. The uncle of Zi Hui Yu, a junior majoring in advertising and public relations, knows a UIR professor who recommended talking to Yi. The mother of freshman Yi Si Wang teaches computer science at UIR and knows Yi. The aunt of Zhen Ze Mi, a petroleum engineering major, is Yi’s friend. The high school volleyball coach of sophomore Jie Yu Song gave her the phone number of Yi’s assistant.

  “All of us come here for” Yi, Da Chuan Nie, a senior and finance major from Shenzhen, told me as we chatted on the Marietta mall, a stone walkway bisecting the campus, with islands of greenery and a tall flagpole with an American flag.

  Yi had recruited Da’s older brother to Marietta. Da’s own first choice had been the University of Missouri, but his TOEFL score was below its bar, he told me. He took Marietta’s English exam at UIR with a roomful of other students—“All of us passed”—but still yearned for Missouri. “This town is too small. Very boring. I have no entertainment. I just play games in my room.”

  Yolanda Feng, a junior English major with a fondness for romantic Victorian novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, was an exchange student from UIR. Yi was in touch with her in Beijing, and then picked her up at the airport in the United States. “I like the peaceful life here,” she told me. “I have to spend a lot of time reading, but it’s very rewarding. It’s a good opportunity to practice English for English majors or those who want to pursue further study in the U.S.”

  As at other colleges, Chinese students at Marietta mostly socialize with each other. Several told me that they had tried rooming with American students for a semester, but cultural differences and their limited English fluency made it awkward. There’s also a financial gap: the Chinese students are generally richer than the Americans, and more likely to own expensive cars, which stirs some resentment. Robert Pastoor, Marietta’s former vice president for student life, told me that Americans could request international roommates on the housing form, but the measure “was probably not very effective.” Some Chinese students pair up with local “mentor families,” who have them over to their houses for dinner or birthday parties, or take them to church.

  One taboo topic between Chinese and American students is UIR’s reputation for espionage. Americans “who took Mandarin and were involved in Asian studies kind of knew that it was the spy school,” Matthew Heinzman, a 2012 graduate in Asian studies and international business, told me. “We didn’t really talk much about it with the UIR students. It’s kind of a touchy subject.”

  Indeed, I raised the issue with several Chinese students, and didn’t get far. “I’m not very interested in politics,” Feng told me.

  “UIR students are just normal students,” Michelle Yu said. “When they graduate, some work for the…” She paused to choose the right word. “Government. Others choose by themselves.”

  UIR students have also transferred to Marietta. One told me that, as a high school senior, he marked UIR as a college option without knowing much about it. It has first dibs in admissions, and picked him, so he had to go. He spent two years there, studying political science. He gradually realized that he preferred engineering and natural sciences, but UIR’s offerings in those fields were meager. After visiting Marietta for the two-week summer program, he decided to go there full-time.

  Some of his UIR classmates, he acknowledged, wanted to work for the security ministry. “Most of the students there are the same as anybody else.”

  After graduating, the bulk of Marietta’s Chinese students work for corporations, either in the United St
ates or China. One exception was Wei Tan, a 2004 graduate who joined the Clinton Foundation’s China office and served as former president Bill Clinton’s interpreter on a 2005 visit to Hunan Province. “It was a lot of talking to do,” Tan told Marietta’s magazine.

  Under Yi’s guidance, the UIR-Marietta alliance expanded beyond recruiting. In 2001, UIR began sending a faculty member or two to Marietta each semester. The professors have taught a wide range of subjects, from ballroom dancing to martial arts to Chinese law.

  Since 2007, at UIR’s request, twenty-three of its students and two professors have visited Marietta each summer, learning about interest groups, public opinion polls, and other real-world influences on U.S. foreign policy. They divide into teams to explore how the United States and China could cooperate on an international issue, such as food safety. In their spare time, they shop at outlet stores and Wal-Mart and sample Americana, from minor-league baseball to the former mayor’s pizzeria, Over the Moon.

  “It’s the coolest thing I do on the side,” says Mark Schaefer, the program’s academic director. “I want to leave them with a good impression of the U.S. and a more accurate sense of how the U.S. works. Most of them probably go on to work in business. It would be very interesting if someone goes to work as a spy or for the Chinese government. At least they’d have a better understanding of the U.S.”

  In 2013, UIR opened its own summer program in Beijing, where its undergraduates can choose among forty courses taught primarily in English by foreigners, including about half a dozen Marietta professors. Classes meet for 16, 24, or 32 hours over one to three weeks, with 30 to 60 students in each class. UIR pays teachers about $125 per hour, plus round-trip airfare and free accommodations in spacious, well-equipped apartments.