U.S. Army veteran runs a California “surrogacy factory,” helping wealthy Chinese clients have American-born kids in bulk. The New York Post reported on September 21 that Patriot Conceptions, a surrogacy agency in Irvine, California, was founded by 37-year-old U.S. Army veteran Haotian Bai. The company mainly serves wealthy Chinese clients: their embryos are implanted in American surrogate mothers so the children are born in the U.S. and automatically get U.S. citizenship. Surrogates are often recruited on Instagram and similar platforms and paid about $60,000 to $120,000. Total cost to clients is roughly $120,000 to $200,000. After birth, the children are usually taken back to China to be raised. In wealthy Chinese circles, having a U.S.-citizen child is treated as a status symbol. Bai is originally from Lanzhou, China. He came to the U.S. around 2012, earned a master’s in environmental engineering at Iowa State, then joined the Army and obtained citizenship that way. He rose to first lieutenant and was stationed in Hawaii. In 2019 he first started Pacific Surrogacy, later launched Patriot Conceptions, and rolled out a TrustUS app for cross-border payments. The company says about 40% of its clients are international. The website is in Chinese and English, and clients are mainly contacted through WeChat. In 2024 he also received a Hoover Institution veterans fellowship at Stanford. The story drew attention after a surrogate using the alias “Judy” came forward. She carried a child through the agency and only later learned from CBS News that the father was Xu Bo, the reclusive billionaire founder of Chinese gaming company Duoyi Network. An ex-girlfriend has alleged Xu used U.S. surrogacy to have a hundred or even three hundred children; the company has acknowledged “a little over a hundred.” Judy said she thought she was helping a single father who wanted to grow his family and felt misled. The agency said it only arranged this one case for Xu, that it discloses the intended parents’ nationality to surrogates, and that it welcomes outside scrutiny. The report notes this is currently fully legal: California’s surrogacy rules are relatively loose, and the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause was recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. The agency even lists 25 states it considers more “friendly” for obtaining U.S. citizenship. Responding to the press, Bai declined to break down clients by nationality and said “the parents being foreigners does not, by itself, mean the arrangement was made just to get citizenship.” The model has sparked debate over surrogacy transparency, the commercialization of birthright citizenship, and national security and population policy. Similar stories have been reported before, including birth tourism in the Northern Mariana Islands and other large-scale Chinese-client surrogacy cases in California. The agency stresses that it also serves military families and offers them discounts.