A public university has been operating an MBA pipeline to roles in China’s state-owned enterprise and government bodies, a recent Strategy Risks report shows.
Missouri State University (MSU) “trained more than 1,500 current and future managers for Chinese state-owned enterprises and government bodies,” including the defense industry, through its MBA program by 2018, according to the report. MSU is a publicly funded institution, and Strategy Risks estimates U.S. taxpayer support for the program reached tens of millions of dollars.
The estimation of taxpayer funding rests on the most detailed figures available, which appear in a recruiting presentation from the Chinese Agricultural University, according to the report. However, the report notes that the materials Strategy Risks found gave “conflicting accounts of the program’s finances.” Public recruiting materials for the MBA program describe “different prices, subsidy arrangements, and responsible payers.”
“We are aware of the report released by Strategy Risks regarding Missouri State University. No taxpayer dollars were directed toward the program, as the report alleges but readily admits it cannot substantiate,” an MSU spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
By 2015, 107 finance personnel from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) system entities had completed the MSU MBA program, according to the report. AVIC is “China’s primary state-owned aviation and defense conglomerate,” which the Department of War designated as a “Communist Chinese military company” in June 2020, and an Executive Order from the Trump administration “prohibited Americans from holding securities in any company on that list.”
One graduate of the MSU MBA program became Party Secretary, Chairman, and Legal Representative for the AVIC International
Financial Leasing Co., according to the report. He was already working for the company as a senior manager when he completed his MBA in 2013.
AVIC is a key weapons exporter, and over the past 20 years, it has thrived “at the center of China’s military aviation buildout,” and is “a participant in defense-industrial networks linked to major international conflicts and human rights abuses,” the report indicated.
AVIC trainees enrolled at MSU seem to have studied “a conventional business curriculum,” per the report. However, AVIC valued the program more for credentialing purposes than for the actual classroom content.
“As the report further acknowledges, the students studied a ‘conventional business curriculum’ with no evidence of espionage, intellectual property theft, misconduct, false affiliations or complaints of harassment. Students admitted to the program were required to comply with all student visa regulations administered by the U.S. State Department,” the spokesperson from MSU told the DCNF.
Other graduates went on to senior roles in China’s “strategic supply chains and surveillance-technology sector,” according to the report.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled the admission process for the MSU MBA program, according to the report. The report notes recruiting materials which required candidates to be formal CCP members cleared for travel overseas. CCP institutes built cohorts, sponsored each candidate and prepared them for the program.
This MSU MBA project began in 1999, when leadership of the Chinese party-state’s State Economic and Trade Commission (SETC) came to the U.S. searching for MBA programs that could train Communist party managers, according to the report. The program at MSU launched in 2001.
A 2010 graduate of the program served as director and vice president of a leading Chinese artificial intelligence and voice-recognition company, which the U.S. Commerce Department placed on the Entity List in 2019 “for supplying voiceprint and voice-recognition technology to Xinjiang security bureaus as part of China’s mass surveillance system targeting Uyghurs and other Muslim
minorities.”
Jim Baker, MSU’s then-Vice President, received the Chinese “Friendship Award” in 2012, according to the report. The “Friendship Award” is used “to cultivate foreign nationals who advance Chinese state interests, and that recipients in such networks ‘unequivocally serve national party goals.’” Baker visited China over 100 times on behalf of MSU.
Chinese university websites were still promoting the program as recent as July 2024, the report found.
The MSU MBA program has a partnership with Liaoning Normal University in China which was established with “formal approval from the Chinese Ministry of Education and the MSU Board of Governors” in 2000, and is still in operation. Those enrolled who qualify are able to transfer to MSU for the completion of their degrees.
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