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Wealthy Chinese couples are implanting their embryos into American women so their children can be born as US citizens, The Post has learned.
The service is provided by a surrogacy agency, Patriot Conceptions, which operates between China and the US and has been accused of hiding details of who the biological parents are from surrogates.
Women who carry babies for the agency are recruited informally through social media and collect between $60,000 and $120,000 dollars for their services.
The children are then swept off by their parents to be raised in China, where it is seen as a status symbol among the wealthy to have a child able to claim US citizenship.
Incredibly, such a service is completely legal, thanks to free-wheeling surrogacy laws and liberal interpretations of the birthright citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court.
Patriot Conceptions is run by a high-energy US Army vet named Haotian Bai—who founded the international surrogacy agency and last year received a prestigious fellowship from top Republican think tank, which describes him as a “pioneering entrepreneur in the third-party reproduction” sector.
Bai’s Irvine, Calif.-based Patriot Conceptions grabbed headlines last week when a surrogate identified as “Judy” came forward when she discovered she was carrying the child of reclusive Chinese billionaire Xu Bo, who has allegedly sired over 300 children.
The surrogate only learned who the father was after being informed by CBS News. She said she had responded to an Instagram ad for Patriot Conceptions, who arranged the surrogacy.
The company said it had only arranged that surrogacy on Bo’s behalf and “the surrogate deserves to have her concerns taken seriously,” according to CBS.
In a 2024 profile on the US Chamber of Commerce’s website, Bai claimed his company helped thousands of parents have children via surrogacy, and 40 percent of his clients were “international.”
A review of the company’s promotional materials suggests those international clients are almost entirely from China. The company offers Chinese or English versions of its website and instructs visitors that the best way to get in touch is through their WeChat channel—China’s most ubiquitous messaging app.
The website also maps the 25 states providing a “generally supportive posture” for the child to easily obtain US citizenship, advising foreign parents to familiarize themselves with the laws in each state when selecting a surrogate. Only one state, Louisiana, is colored black for “restrictive or unresolved posture.”
When contacted by The Post, Bai said: “We do not disclose client demographic breakdowns. We collect intended parents’ nationality at intake and disclose it to the surrogate during matching.
“A parent’s foreign nationality … does not by itself establish that obtaining citizenship is the purpose of an arrangement.”
Bai, 37, previously built a US-based surrogacy company catering to Chinese parents in 2019, called Pacific Surrogacy. It was also based in California, which has among the nation’s loosest surrogacy laws.
A lawsuit between Bai and his then-business partner, Yulun Jiang, reviewed by The Post revealed the company’s financials were all run out of China.
Bai also recently launched a mysterious app called TrustUS, which describes itself as “a Software as a Service company” which facilitates international bank transfers and payments.
Patriot Conceptions’ base cost for future parents is listed as $120,000–$200,000. Typically, Chinese parents come to the US on a tourist visa to complete their embryo work, although in some cases, parents will simply ship embryos from their home country to the US, where they can be implanted in American surrogates.
Sources tell The Post Bai arrived in the US around 2012 from Lanzhou University in Central China to pursue a master’s degree in environmental engineering—an eco-friendly pollution management field—at Iowa State University.
Bai graduated from the program and “joined the Army to get citizenship,” a former colleague told The Post, which at the time was welcoming non-citizens to enlist in exchange for fast-tracked Green Cards.
“The Army was recruiting Chinese students to join the officers program. When he joined the military, I was proud of the guy. He seemingly did extremely well in the military,” the source said.
“I knew him as a hardworking, decent fellow.”
Bai climbed to the rank of lieutenant and his service brought him to Hawaii, where he lives today.
In 2019, Bai was identified as a “Hawaii realtor” in local reports, and was accused of selling Hawaiian legislative internships to students from China for $5,000-a-pop.
“All of a sudden, I started getting these Chinese interns, assigned to my office somehow. I still don’t really understand how that happened.
“I remember scratching my head and I asked how these interns came to my office and why. I didn’t ask for them or approve them,” former Hawaii House of Representatives member Matthew LoPresti of Oahu told The Post.
The intern swarm was particularly unnerving, said LoPresti, because of sensitive national defense work his office was engaged in. After a false ballistic missile threat was erroneously circulated in 2018, LoPresti’s office became heavily involved in Hawaii’s missile defense program. He was also working for the FBI on counterintelligence, he told The Post.
Just before the interns showed up, “I started having all these meetings with generals and getting security briefings at the military intelligence headquarters up in Camp Smith,” said LoPresti. “I was getting intelligence briefings about missile defense capabilities.”
According to local news reports at the time, Bai “was hired by the Chinese placement firms to arrange several of these internships.”
“These Chinese kids were not necessarily what they claimed to be there for. There was something suspicious about it. I brought it to the FBI’s attention. The timing was very strange,” said LoPresti.
That aside, Hawaiian lawmakers began to suspect the interns weren’t being fed by their hosts and forced to live in cramped, squalid conditions during their two-week stints in the Aloha State.
“I remember one intern had a meltdown,” said LoPresti. “This girl had this blowout in the middle of the state Capitol yelling at everyone in Chinese. I have no idea what she was saying.”
Soon after, LoPresti got the program shut down. It had been sold as a cultural exchange initiative with China. At the time, Bai denied students were being exploited. He faced no charges over the incident and denied in an email to The Post that he had ever sold internships.
Since that snafu, Bai has set out to “disrupt” the distinct worlds of business, veterans affairs and fertility—speaking at conventions, going on podcasts, attending galas and writing buzzy opinion pieces for glossy business magazine “Inc.”
The gestation commando also has spent time working his way up within Republican circles. In 2024, Bai was inducted into the Veterans Fellowship Program at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University’s conservative think tank.
It is unclear what policy initiatives Bai worked on during his fellowship at Hoover, which has been run by former George W. Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice since 2020. The organization did not respond to questions from The Post.
Chinese surrogacies have been under the microscope since a husband and wife were accused of hoarding at least 26 children in their California mansion most of which were born to them by surrogacy.
The married couple—Guojun Xuan, 65, and Silvia Zhang, 38— had established their own surrogacy business at their multi-million dollar mansion in Arcadia. Patriot Conceptions has said it is not connected in any way to that case.
Earlier this year, The Post blew the lid off thousands of Chinese women who’ve turned the Northern Mariana Islands into a birth-tourism factory—paying up to $45,000 so their babies automatically become US citizens—exploiting a loophole that has produced an estimated 1.5 million American children now being raised in China. They will one day be able to vote and sponsor relatives through chain migration.
