by WorldTribune Staff, September 24, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
A U.S. Army veteran born in China leveraged his U.S. military status to build a business called Patriot Conceptions which markets commercial surrogacy services to wealthy (mostly Chinese) clients.
The veteran, Haotian Bai, even received from a conservative think tank an award for his successful veteran-owned startup.
Patriot Conceptions founder Haotian Bai has cozied up to powerful Republican groups while running a business that lets wealthy parents in China have ‘American’ babies via surrogacy. / Haotian Bai / LinkedIn
What Bai is actually operating, critics say, is a “birth tourism” pipeline where embryos created by Chinese parents are transported to the U.S. and implanted into American surrogates. Because the children are born on U.S. soil, they are guaranteed birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Birth Tourism on Aug. 6, It is aimed at stopping foreign nationals from traveling to the U.S. on temporary visas primarily to give birth and secure citizenship for their children.
The operation gained scrutiny following reports involving a surrogate named “Judy” who discovered through a media investigation that she was carrying a child for Chinese billionaire Xu Bo, who was allegedly using such services to father dozens of American children.
“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,” Chadwick Moore reported for the New York Post on Sept. 21.
Having been born U.S. citizens, the children are then taken 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 U.S. 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,” Moore noted.
Last year, Bai received a prestigious fellowship from a top Republican think tank, which describes him as a “pioneering entrepreneur in the third-party reproduction” sector.
Bai’s Irvine, California-based business was thrust into the spotlight last week after the surrogate identified as “Judy” came forward when she discovered she was carrying Xu Bo’s child. Xu, who owns major Chinese mobile video game company Guangzhou Duoyi Network, 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 Xu’s behalf and “the surrogate deserves to have her concerns taken seriously,” according to CBS.
The company’s website maps the 25 states it says are providing a “generally supportive posture” for the children to easily obtain U.S. citizenship, advising foreign parents to familiarize themselves with the laws in each state when selecting a surrogate.
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, or the expectation that a child will live outside the U.S., does not by itself establish that obtaining citizenship is the purpose of an arrangement. Those are separate questions from any individual client’s motives.”
