Chinese Tycoons Use US Surrogacy Agencies to Have American Citizen Children in Bulk
Multiple media outlets, including the New York Post, have revealed that an increasing number of wealthy Chinese families are arranging births through US surrogacy agencies to ensure their children are born with US citizenship. Patriot Conceptions, a California-based company specializing in surrogacy services between China and the US, has been accused in some cases of not fully disclosing the true identity and scale of the commissioning party (biological father) to the surrogate mothers.
Chinese gaming industry tycoon Xu Bo has been reported to have arranged for the birth of over 100 children through Patriot Conceptions and other surrogacy agencies, while his former partner Tang Jing claims the number could be as high as 300. Xu Bo himself denies the figure of 300, stating that he has legal guardianship of 12 American-born children, while his companies acknowledge the number is "slightly over 100."
A surrogate mother using the pseudonym "Judy" stated that she was only informed at the time of signing that the commissioning party was a "single father" and was not made aware of the specific identity until she saw related reports from CBS News, where she learned the true commissioning party was Xu Bo. She attempted to meet the commissioning father five times but was unsuccessful, and when she inquired about other surrogate mothers, the agency informed her there were "close to twenty."
Another surrogate mother, Andrea (an undocumented immigrant of Honduran descent), reported that she only met the commissioning couple via video call on the day of delivery, and the newborn was taken away by an elderly couple she had never met before. Surrogate mother Mayra Arley Hernandez stated that she was carrying twins and later learned that the commissioning party had used multiple surrogate mothers simultaneously. All 32 surrogate mothers interviewed had their embryo transfer surgeries performed in California.
Haotian Bai, the founder of Patriot Conceptions, was born in China and moved to the US around 2012. He studied environmental engineering at Iowa State University and later obtained US citizenship through military service. Between 2024 and 2025, he was qualified as a veteran researcher at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The company charges commissioning parents between $120,000 and $200,000, with surrogate mothers receiving $60,000 to $120,000, and markets primarily to Chinese clients through a bilingual website and WeChat.
From a financial and regulatory perspective, the $120,000 to $200,000 paid by commissioning families essentially serves to circumvent domestic restrictions and directly purchase the scarce resource of US citizenship. Surrogate mothers, in turn, bear the physical risks and information asymmetry of the pregnancy for a fee of $60,000 to $120,000—many interviewed surrogate mothers reported limited knowledge of the commissioning party's true identity and scale of births. Currently, there are no federal laws in the US limiting the number of surrogate mothers a single commissioning party can use, and most states do not require criminal background checks for commissioning parents. Only New York State requires surrogacy agencies to operate with a license, while California has become a major hub for the surrogacy industry due to relatively lax regulations. Lawyer Melissa Brisman confirmed that there are currently no legal provisions limiting the number of surrogates a single commissioning party can use.
In another regulatory case related to this matter, a couple in Arcadia, California, Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan, were arrested in May 2025 for suspected felony child abuse and neglect, with authorities taking away 21 children (15 from their residence and 6 from other locations). More than five children born through surrogacy were placed in other states. Related charges are currently on hold pending investigation, and the couple denies any wrongdoing. There are no official statistics on surrogacy in the US, but it is estimated that there are about 10,000 surrogacy births annually across the country.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Using reproductive arrangements to obtain US citizenship is not a new phenomenon. As early as around 2015, several cases of "maternity hotels" in Orange County, Southern California, were exposed, with federal prosecutors charging multiple agencies that specialized in helping Chinese pregnant women give birth in the US with immigration fraud. The model at that time involved pregnant women traveling to the US on tourist visas to give birth, with fees ranging from $15,000 to $50,000. The surrogacy model exposed this time goes further—commissioning parties do not have to bear the risks of pregnancy and cross-border travel, directly utilizing the bodies of American surrogate mothers to complete births, transforming the act of "having a child to gain citizenship" from a personal action into a commercially scalable process. The scale of over a hundred children reported for Xu Bo far exceeds any previously exposed cases.
In terms of financial pathways, Patriot Conceptions charges commissioning parents between $120,000 and $200,000, of which $60,000 to $120,000 is paid to surrogate mothers, with the price difference being the agency's gross profit. The company accurately targets high-net-worth individuals in China through its bilingual website and WeChat, packaging "US citizenship" as a purchasable product. If Xu Bo has indeed completed over a hundred surrogacy arrangements as reported, his total personal expenditure could reach tens of millions of dollars, indicating that the right to citizenship, which is not originally a tradable legal identity, has effectively been transformed into a purchasable asset under sufficient financial support.
This model shares structural similarities with previous "birth tourism maternity center" cases and the broader EB-5 investment immigration industry—essentially, all three involve "exchanging funds for US identity-related resources," with the distinction being that EB-5 purchases residency rights, maternity centers purchase citizenship based on the birthplace of children, while surrogacy agencies purchase citizenship completely detached from the commissioning party's reproductive actions. The case of the couple in Arcadia, California, suspected of abusing and neglecting 21 surrogate children, further exposes the risks to child welfare in an industry that has expanded far beyond its original intent of "helping infertile couples conceive" without unified regulatory standards.
The structural change behind this is essentially that regulatory changes lag behind technological and business model evolution—the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution establishes birthright citizenship with the legislative presumption that "the birth mother delivers within the US," while commercial surrogacy completely separates "genetic/commissioning relationships" from "place of gestation," making the acquisition of citizenship no longer necessarily tied to the commissioning party's immigration status or actual residency. Coupled with the federal regulatory vacuum where there are no limits on the number of surrogate mothers a single commissioning party can use, and only New York State requiring agencies to operate with a license, the legal framework originally designed for "one infertile couple, one surrogacy" becomes completely ineffective when faced with ultra-high-net-worth individuals willing to operate in bulk. This is why the industry currently relies on media exposure to force subsequent state-level regulatory tightening rather than relying on existing laws to proactively correct itself.