EAST LANSING — A Michigan State University communications program runs a joint master’s degree with a Beijing university that describes itself as “an educational stronghold for the Party’s propaganda, ideological and cultural undertakings.” The Chinese partner also hosts military delegations and runs training for the People’s Liberation Army, according to a new report obtained by The Bureau.
The report, by the New York geopolitical research firm Strategy Risks, examines Michigan State’s collaboration with the Communication University of China, known as CUC. It also describes a separate partnership with Shanghai Normal University, where Michigan State supports a journalism and communications master’s program whose Chinese curriculum covers “psychological, conceptual, and information warfare.”
The findings land in a state that The Bureau has reported is emerging as a center of FBI counterintelligence work against China. Last week, prosecutors in Detroit unsealed charges against Di Jin, a 41-year-old Chinese businesswoman arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, alleging she gathered information from American government contacts for China’s Ministry of State Security. According to the FBI affidavit, she met high-level American officials at a national security event at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2016.
The FBI’s Detroit office has also investigated five University of Michigan students charged in 2024 over photographs taken at the Camp Grayling military training site, and several researchers charged in 2025 over biological materials brought to a University of Michigan laboratory. In January 2025, the University of Michigan ended its partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University after pressure from Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
The Strategy Risks report says it “is not alleging that MSU knowingly supports Chinese military or propaganda objectives.”
Its concern is subtler.
Expertise in communications, public-opinion analysis and artificial intelligence, the report argues, may flow through a Chinese partner to propaganda and military bodies, feeding what the People’s Liberation Army calls “cognitive domain operations.” American research-security rules, built around advanced technology and military affiliation, were not designed to catch any such unintentional contribution to a potential adversary’s military toolkit.
The Communication University of China was founded in 1954. In 2019, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology chose it to host the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, according to the report. The laboratory says part of its mission is safeguarding “ideological security and political security in the media field.”
A 2016 Ministry of Education document cited in the report names the university, with Renmin and Tsinghua universities, as a key school for training master’s students in international journalism and propaganda. The document also notes that the university and China Central Television, the state broadcaster under the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, jointly established a school of journalism and communication.
Michigan State, a public university in East Lansing with more than 41,000 undergraduates, signed agreements with the Chinese university in November 2019 for a dual master’s degree in international digital advertising. Students spend their first year at the Chinese university’s campus on Hainan Island and their second in Michigan. The Chinese side manages admissions and visa assistance. The report says the curriculum includes compulsory modules taught by the Chinese university titled “Research on the Theory and Practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and “Marxism and the Methodology of Social Science.”