China’s state-owned electronics giant Huawei is reportedly “secretly funding cutting-edge research at U.S. universities” through a Washington-based nonprofit called the Optica Foundation.
Thursday’s Bloomberg News report Said Huawei is the sole funding source for the research competition run by the Optica Foundation, a professional organization that specializes in visible light technologies such as fiber optics and lasers. The contest awards large prizes to optical research projects and receives hundreds of entries each year.
Bloomberg reached out to university officials, contest applicants, and even one of the judges, all of whom said they had no knowledge that Huawei was involved. Reporters discovered a private document specifically instructing the Optica Foundation not to disclose the involvement of Chinese tech companies.
“The existence and contents of this Agreement and the relationship between the parties are also considered confidential information,” the document states. The outlined agreement will be signed in 2021 and will last for 10 years, with a total award of $10 million.
Optical also offers 10 other “early career awards and fellowships” that don’t appear to be affiliated with Huawei, but also feature much smaller cash prizes and grants.
Optica told Bloomberg that Huawei’s donation was reviewed by its legal team and approved by its board of directors. The foundation insisted there was “nothing unusual” about donors remaining anonymous.
Legal experts told Bloomberg that Huawei’s donation to Optica is probably legal, but definitely objectionable and could have some national security implications.
Research security experts still say the lack of transparency underlying this arrangement violates the spirit of university and U.S. funding agency policies that require researchers to disclose whether they receive foreign funding. He said there was.
They also said that some of the resulting research could be relevant to both defense and commerce. In an online post, the Optica Foundation lists “subsea and space-based solutions for global communication networks” and “highly sensitive optical sensors and detectors” as “interesting” topics.
“It’s unseemly that a prestigious research foundation is anonymously accepting funding from a Chinese company that raises a number of national security concerns for the U.S. government,” said the author, who works on research security issues at a defense contractor and co-author. said James Mulvenon, author of A seminal book on Chinese industrial espionage.
A security official at Texas A&M University said the school would not have entered the research competition if Huawei’s involvement had not been “closely concealed.” Harvard also said it has a policy against “working with Huawei,” which is a bit awkward since the Optica Foundation’s chairman is Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University. .
The foundation’s treatment of Huawei like any other corporate donor appears disingenuous at best. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies classified Huawei products are cited as a major security risk that could be compromised by Chinese military intelligence. The company has so far targeted Due to US sanctions, placed It was placed on a trade restriction list, denied permission to purchase sensitive U.S. electronic components, and even banned from using Google’s popular Android smartphone operating system.
It may also be somewhat disingenuous for university officials to express complete surprise at Huawei’s involvement in the research contest after a Bloomberg report exposed it. That’s because one of the 10 members of the contest’s selection committee is a Huawei executive named Xian Liu.
Report published 2 weeks ago found Companies linked to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have spent more than $24 million lobbying the U.S. government since 2020. Huawei was by far the biggest spender on lobbyists, accounting for $10.8 million of the total.
The Chinese Communist Party’s influence over American universities, businesses, and government has become a problem. growing concerns.The Trump administration did several things effort It was intended to investigate Chinese funding of U.S. universities, but such investigations have been pursued with less fervor under President Joe Biden.
