Some wealthy Chinese couples are implanting their embryos into American women so that their children can be born and have American citizenship. The identity of a mediator company “Patriot Conception” and its founder that offers this service has attracted media attention.
According to the New York Post, the surrogacy agency, Patriot Conception, operates between China and the United States and is accused of withholding information about the biological parents from surrogate mothers.
The agency recruits surrogate women through social media informally, with their compensation ranging from $60,000 to $120,000.
After the children are born, they are sent back to China to be raised. In China, having a child eligible to apply for American citizenship is seen as a symbol of the affluent class.
Due to the lenient surrogacy laws in the United States and the birthright citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, this service is completely legal.
Patriot Conception is operated by a former U.S. Army veteran named Haotian Bai. He founded this international surrogacy agency and was awarded a prize by the top Republican think tank, the Hoover Institute, last year for being a pioneer in the field of third-party assisted reproduction.
The basic fee charged by the company to prospective parents ranges from $120,000 to $200,000. Typically, Chinese parents come to the U.S. on tourist visas to undergo embryo implantation, but in some instances, parents also directly transport embryos from China to the U.S. for implantation by American surrogate mothers.
Last week, Patriot Conception in Irvine, California, became the center of attention. A surrogate mother using the alias “Judy” discovered that she was carrying the child of a mysterious Chinese billionaire named Xue Bo, who reportedly has fathered over 300 children.
Upon being informed by CBS News, the surrogate mother learned the identity of the child’s father. She said she had contacted them through an advertisement on Instagram by Patriot Conception, which promised $120,000 in compensation for being a surrogate mother.
According to CBS, the surrogacy company stated that they only arranged the surrogacy on behalf of Xue Bo.
In a profile on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website in 2024, Bai claimed that his company had helped thousands of parents have their own children through surrogacy, with 40% of clients from “abroad.”
Review of the company’s promotional materials revealed that these international clients were predominantly from China. The company offers websites in both Chinese and English versions and advises visitors to contact them via their WeChat account.
The company’s website also highlights 25 states as being “more friendly” towards obtaining U.S. citizenship and advises overseas parents to familiarize themselves with the relevant regulations of each state before choosing a surrogacy location. The only state marked in black, indicating “stricter restrictions or unclear regulations,” is Louisiana.
When contacted by the New York Post, Bai stated, “We will not disclose detailed demographic data of our clients. We collect information on the nationality of prospective parents during contact and inform surrogate mothers during the matching process that foreign nationality of parents alone does not prove that obtaining citizenship is the purpose of surrogacy arrangements.”
Thirty-seven-year-old Bai previously founded a surrogacy company called Pacific Surrogacy in 2019, catering specifically to Chinese parents. The company is also based in California, which is one of the most lenient states regarding surrogacy laws in the U.S.
Bai had a legal dispute with his former business partner Yulun Jiang, where court documents showed that the financial operations of Pacific Surrogacy were all conducted in China.
Bai also recently launched a mysterious application called “TrustUS,” claiming to be a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, providing international bank transfer and payment services.
Sources told the New York Post that Bai came to the U.S. from Gansu Lanzhou University in China in 2012 to pursue a master’s degree in environmental engineering at Iowa State University and later joined the U.S. Army to obtain American citizenship. At the time, the U.S. Army was actively recruiting non-citizens for enlistment in exchange for expedited green card opportunities.
“The Army was recruiting Chinese students for the officer program back then. I was proud of him when he enlisted. He excelled in the army. The person I knew was diligent and upright,” said a source.
Bai was promoted to lieutenant and served in Hawaii during his military service.
After retiring from the U.S. Army, Bai settled in Hawaii, where local media reported in 2019 that he was selling internship opportunities at the Hawaii State Legislature to Chinese international students for a “brokerage fee” of $5,000 per person.
Former Hawaii State House Representative Matthew LoPresti mentioned that his office was suddenly flooded with a group of Chinese interns at the time, and he had no idea why. “I did not apply for them nor did I authorize their presence,” LoPresti said.
LoPresti stated that the influx of interns seemed suspicious, especially since his office was involved in sensitive defense work related to the Hawaii missile defense system and was assisting the FBI in counterintelligence work at the same time.
Reported by local news at the time, Bai was “hired by a Chinese intermediary company to arrange several internship opportunities.”
LoPresti told the New York Post that the arrangement of these Chinese interns was “a bit suspicious” and the timing was very unusual, leading him to report the matter to the FBI.
The internship program was originally advertised as the “Sino-U.S. Cultural Exchange Program,” but Hawaii lawmakers at the time suspected that the interns did not receive proper care during the two-week internship period, including poor meal offerings and living conditions.
LoPresti dissipated the program at the time, while Bai denied that the students were exploited or that he had ever sold internship opportunities.
Since that incident, Bai has been determined to “subvert” the drastically different fields of business, veteran affairs, and fertility. He has spoken at various conferences, participated in podcasts, attended summits, and written commentaries for the business magazine “Inc.”
This “fertility expert” is active in Republican circles and received a veteran award from the conservative think tank Hoover Institution at Stanford University last year, where he served as a researcher for a year.
It is currently unclear what policy programs Bai was involved in during his time as a researcher at the Hoover Institution. Since 2020, the Hoover Institution has been led by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The institution did not respond to requests for comment from the New York Post.
The controversy surrounding Bai’s surrogacy services stems from facilitating many Chinese elites to have children with American citizenship, once again exposing the loopholes in the U.S. Constitution protecting birthright citizenship.
In July 2025, a Chinese couple in Los Angeles, Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, faced allegations of “child abuse” after it was revealed that they were “hoarding” at least 26 children, most of whom were born through surrogacy, sparking controversy.
Earlier this year, U.S. media exposed the Northern Mariana Islands as a “birthing tourism factory,” with thousands of Chinese women coming to give birth solely for their children to obtain American citizenship.
It is estimated that Chinese parents have given birth to around 1.5 million American children through the U.S.’s birthright citizenship, and in the future, these “Americans” raised in China will have the right to vote and can sponsor family members to immigrate to the U.S. through chain migration.