From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Melissa O’Rourke

A growing number of ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals are turning to U.S. surrogates to have children on American soil, taking advantage of America’s largely unregulated market and birthright citizenship, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

In one such case, Chinese video game billionaire Xu Bo has sought parental rights for at least four unborn children in Los Angeles, having already fathered or arranged surrogacy for at least eight additional children, according to the WSJ. The trend coincides with intensifying debates over the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the country, a policy the Trump administration has sought to reinterpret.

Xu appeared in a 2023 confidential court hearing by video from China, telling the judge he hoped to have about 20 U.S.-born children, with a preference for boys, to inherit his business, the outlet reported. Several of the children were reportedly being cared for by nannies in Irvine, California, while awaiting paperwork to travel to China.

Last month, Xu’s ex-girlfriend claimed in a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo that he had 300 children living across multiple properties in different countries, according to the WSJ. Duoyi Network, Xu’s company, disputed the 300 figure but confirmed that through years of U.S. surrogacy, Xu has “only a little over 100” children.

“The boss does not accept interview requests from anyone for any purpose,” a representative for Duoyi Network said in an email to the WSJ, adding that “much of what you described is untrue.”

Neither the Duoyi Network nor Xu could be reached for comment.

Xu is far from alone.

In May, police launched a child abuse investigation into Chinese national Guojun Xuan and his wife after a two-month-old in their care was hospitalized with a head injury. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services subsequently removed 21 children from the couple’s custody, including some born to surrogates.

Notably, Xuan served as a senior Chinese government official for at least two decades with the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Congress, responsible for repressive policies contributing to ongoing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found in July.

Nathan Zhang, founder and CEO of IVF USA — a network of fertility clinics in the U.S. and Mexico catering to wealthy Chinese clients — also told the WSJ that a growing number of extremely wealthy foreign clients are commissioning dozens, or even hundreds, of U.S.-born children to create what he described as an “unstoppable family dynasty.”

One Chinese businessman reportedly sought more than 200 children at once through surrogacy. Zhang said the individual was “speechless” when asked how he planned to raise all the children, according to the outlet.

Another California surrogacy agency owner said he had helped fulfill a request from a Chinese parent seeking 100 children, with the “order” spread across multiple agencies.

Wang Huiwu, another Chinese executive, reportedly used U.S. surrogates and egg donors to father ten girls, with the intention of marrying them off to influential men. He purchased dozens of eggs from models, a finance Ph.D. and a musician at costs ranging from $6,000 to $7,500 each, people familiar with his company told the WSJ.

The CEO of a New York IVF clinic helping connect Chinese parents with surrogacy agencies said that when a client requests three or four simultaneous surrogacies, agencies — which typically receive $40,000 to $50,000 per surrogacy, in addition to payments to the surrogate carriers — often respond enthusiastically.

“I’m getting positive feedback from the surrogacy agencies, they’re like, ‘This is a big one! I want to do this!’” the CEO told the outlet.

U.S.-based surrogacy arrangements involving foreign nationals more than quadrupled from 780 carrier cycles in 2014 to 3,240 cycles in 2019, accounting for nearly 40% of the U.S. total, researchers from Emory University found. Between 2014 and 2020, 41% of international surrogacy clients were from China.

Following reports of Chinese national Guojun Xuan’s abuse of children in his care, Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy Act, which would ban the use of surrogacy in the U.S. by people from certain foreign countries, including China.

“America’s surrogacy system is meant to help individuals build families – it should never be the avenue to allow abuse, neglect, or deceit of innocent women and babies,” Scott said in November while introducing the bill. “And it’s terrifying that this might be at the hands of foreign adversaries with the sole intent of having a child that is a U.S. citizen.”

The Supreme Court is expected to consider President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship in early 2026.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Greg Blackie

Our country is facing an energy crisis. No, not because of new demand from data centers or AI. Instead, it’s because utilities in nearly every state, due to government imposed “renewable” mandates, self-imposed mandates, and the supercharging of the Green New Scam under the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” have been shutting down vital coal resources and building out almost exclusively intermittent and costly resources like solar, wind, and battery storage.

President Donald Trump understands this, and that is why on day one of his administration he declared an Energy Emergency. Then, a few months later, the President signed a trio of Executive Orders designed to keep our “beautiful, clean coal” burning and providing the reliable, baseload, and affordable electricity Americans have benefitted from for generations.

Those orders have been used to keep coal generation online that was slated to shut down in Michigan and will potentially keep two units operating that were scheduled to shut down in Colorado this December. In Arizona, however, the Cholla Power Plant in Navajo County was shuttered by the utility just weeks after Trump explicitly called out the plant for saving in a press conference.

Unlike states with green mandates, Arizona essentially has none. Instead, our utilities, like many around the country, have self-imposed commitments to go “Net Zero” by 2050. To meet that target, they have planned to shut down all coal generation in the state by 2032 and plan to build out almost exclusively solar, wind, and battery storage to meet an expected explosive growth in demand, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. So it is no surprise that like much of the rest of the country, Arizona is facing an energy crisis.

Taking a look at our largest regulated utilities (APS, TEP, and UNS) and the largest nonprofit utility, SRP, future plans paint an alarming picture. Combined, over the next 15 years, these utilities expect to see demand increase from 19,200 MW to 28,000 MW. For reference, 1,000 MW of electricity is enough to power roughly 250,000 homes. To meet that growth in demand, however, Arizonans will only get a net increase of 989 MW of reliable generation (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) compared to 22,543 MW (or nearly 23 times as much) of intermittent solar, wind, and battery storage.

But what about all of the new natural gas coming into the state? The vast majority of it will be eaten up just to replace existing coal resources, not to bring additional affordable energy to the grid. For example, the SRP board recently voted to approve the conversion of their Springerville coal plant to natural gas by 2030, which follows an earlier vote to convert another of their coal plants, Coronado, to natural gas by 2029. This coal conversion trap leaves ratepayers with the same amount of energy as before, eating up new natural gas capacity, without the benefit of more electricity.

So, while the Arizona utilities plan to collectively build an additional 4,538 MW of natural gas capacity over the next 15 years, at the same time they will be removing -3,549 MW (all of what is left on the grid today) of coal. And there are no plans for more nuclear capacity anytime soon. Instead, to meet their voluntary climate commitments, utilities plan to saddle ratepayers with the cost and resultant blackouts of the green new scam.

It’s no surprise then that Arizona’s largest regulated utilities, APS and TEP, are seeking double digit rate hikes next year. It’s not just Arizona. Excel customers in Colorado (with a 100% clean energy commitment) and in Minnesota (also with a 100% clean energy commitment) are facing nearly double-digit rate hikes. The day before Thanksgiving, PPL customers in Rhode Island (with a state mandate of 100% renewable by 2033) found out they may see rate hikes next year. Dominion (who has a Net Zero by 2050 commitment) wanted to raise rates for customers in Virginia by 15%. Just last month, regulators approved a 9% increase. Importantly, these rate increases are to recover costs for expenses incurred years ago, meaning they are clearly to cover the costs of the energy “transition” supercharged under the Biden administration, not from increased demand from data centers and AI.

It’s the same story around the country. Electricity rates are rising. Reliability is crumbling. We know the cause. For generations, we’ve been able to provide reliable energy at an affordable cost. The only variable that has changed has been what we are choosing to build. Then, it was reliable, dispatchable power. Now, it is intermittent sources that we know cost more, and that we know cause blackouts, all to meet absurd goals of going 100% renewable – something that no utility, state, or country has been able to achieve. And we know the result when they try.

This crisis can be avoided. Trump has laid out the plan to unleash American Energy. Now, it’s time for utilities to drop their costly green new scam commitments and go back to building reliable and affordable power that generations to come will benefit from.

Greg Blackie, Deputy Director of Policy at the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Greg graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State University with a B.S. in Political Science in 2019. He served as a policy intern with the Republican caucus at the Arizona House of Representatives and covered Arizona political campaigns for America Rising during the 2020 election cycle.