Wealthy Chinese parents turn to US surrogacy for American-born children

A California surrogacy agency serving wealthy Chinese parents is under scrutiny after a surrogate learned that her baby is intended for a Chinese billionaire reported to have more than 100 U.S.-born children.

The woman, identified only as Judy, said in a CBS News report aired Sept. 13 that she signed with Irvine-based surrogacy agency Patriot Conceptions after seeing an Instagram ad offering $120,000, and was told the intended parent was a single father hoping to expand his family.

Leaked documents obtained by CBS named the father as Xu Bo, a video game executive. Judy said the agency told her he had hired close to two dozen surrogates, and that she asked to meet him several times but never did. "I feel blindsided. I feel misled," she said.

A former partner of Xu has claimed he fathered as many as 300 children. His company, Duoyi Network, disputed that figure but told The Wall Street Journal in December 2025 that he has "only a little over 100" through U.S. surrogacy. Xu told a closed Los Angeles court hearing in 2023 that he wanted about 20 U.S.-born children to inherit his business, the Journal reported.

Patriot Conceptions said in a Sept. 17 statement that it facilitated Judy's surrogacy but was not Xu's only agency, and that her concerns deserve to be taken seriously. It also told CBS it had encouraged her to end the contract, which she denies.

An international couple poses with a newborn in a photo posted on Patriot Conceptions' website. Photo courtesy of Patriot Conceptions

The agency, founded in 2019 by Haotian Bai, a 37-year-old U.S. Army veteran born in China, charges intended parents a base price of $120,000 to $200,000, while surrogates receive $60,000 to $120,000, the New York Post reported on Sept. 21.

In a profile on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, Bai said the company had helped thousands of parents and that 40% of its clients were international. The Post's review of the company's promotional materials suggested those clients are almost entirely Chinese.

The company's website comes in Chinese and English and directs prospective clients to WeChat. It also maps 25 states it rates as broadly supportive for securing a child's U.S. citizenship, marking only Louisiana, which bans paid surrogacy, as restrictive.

Bai told the Post the company does not disclose client demographics but records intended parents' nationality at intake and shares it with surrogates during matching. A parent's foreign nationality, he said, "does not by itself establish that obtaining citizenship is the purpose of an arrangement."

Bai came to the U.S. around 2012 from China's Lanzhou University to study for a master's degree at Iowa State University, then joined the Army under a program that fast-tracked green cards for non-citizen recruits, sources told the Post. He later held a 2024-2025 veteran fellowship at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

In 2018, while working as a real estate agent in Hawaii, Bai was hired by China-based placement firms to arrange internships at the state legislature for Chinese students whose families paid the firms $5,000 to $6,000 each, Hawaii News Now reported at the time. Then-House Speaker Scott Saiki shut the program down amid allegations that students were exploited. Bai denied selling the internships and faced no charges, according to the Post.

Such arrangements hinge on the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that guarantee on June 30, striking down President Donald Trump's 2025 executive order restricting birthright citizenship.

Trump signed a new order on Aug. 6 that denies recognition of citizenship in several new categories, including, according to immigration lawyers, cases in which parents pay a surrogate to give birth in the U.S. A federal judge in Maryland blocked it on Sept. 2 for a class of children covered by an existing lawsuit, calling the order "almost certainly unconstitutional" as applied to them, The Hill reported.

Emory University researchers found in a 2024 study published in Fertility and Sterility that 32% of the 40,177 embryo transfers to U.S. surrogates from 2014 to 2020 were for foreign intended parents, a share that climbed from 22% in 2014 to nearly 40% in 2019. Chinese nationals accounted for 41.7% of those foreign clients.

Nathan Zhang, founder of IVF USA, a network of clinics in the U.S. and Mexico serving wealthy Chinese clients, told the Journal that a growing number of ultra-rich clients now commission dozens or even hundreds of U.S.-born children to build a family dynasty. That marks a shift from earlier demand driven by China's former one-child policy. Zhang said he turned down one businessman who wanted more than 200 children at once.

In July 2025, authorities raided the Arcadia home of Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, near Los Angeles, and took 21 children, most born to surrogates, into custody after the couple's 2-month-old son was hospitalized with injuries suspected to be from abuse. At least five more of their surrogate-born babies were later taken into custody in other states, CBS reported.