House Republicans argue in a new congressional report that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding over the past decade have contributed to China's military technological advances.
Collaboration between U.S. and Chinese scholars has resulted in research papers on advanced research into topics such as hypersonics, directed energy, nuclear and high-energy physics, artificial intelligence, and autonomy.
Republicans argue that in the event of war with China, the information could be used as a weapon against the U.S. Some of the collaboration they identified related to military applications such as high explosives, target tracking and drone operation networks.
The House Select Committee on China Competition, working with the Committee on Education and Labor, found nearly 9,000 collaborative research papers funded through the Department of Defense (DOD) or the Intelligence Community (IC) and published by co-authors with ties to Chinese “defense and security agencies,” including entities blacklisted by the Department of Commerce.
A new report reveals how Chinese researchers are bringing American research back to China to benefit its defense industry. (Feng Hao/PLA/Chinese Army/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“The purpose of this research funding is to produce advances that will ultimately result in applied warfighting and intelligence capabilities to defend America against foreign adversaries,” the report summary states. “Yet the research funded by the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Agency provides backdoor access to the very foreign adversaries that these capabilities are meant to protect.”
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According to the report, more than 2,000 papers funded by the Department of Defense included Chinese co-authors with direct ties to China's defense research and industrial base.
The report recommended stricter guidelines for federally funded research, including limiting the right of researchers receiving U.S. grants to collaborate with Chinese universities and companies with ties to the military.
The committee said China is orchestrating a campaign under the guise of academic collaboration to partner with prestigious U.S. universities to transfer American technology and expertise to China and evade government blacklists.
Six case studies focus on research institutions. The lawmakers found that Chinese researchers, working with researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science's Earth and Planetary Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of California, Berkeley, were collaborating with U.S. academia to help China “achieve advances in fourth-generation nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, graphene semiconductors, and robotics,” and then bringing the knowledge they learned back to their home countries.
These three institutes — Tsinghua University's Shenzhen Institute at Berkeley, the Georgia Institute of Technology's Shenzhen Institute, and the Sichuan University's Pittsburgh Institute — bring U.S. scholars, many of whom conduct federally funded research, to China to collaborate on research, advise Chinese scholars, mentor Chinese students, and advise companies on their expertise.
According to the report, more than 2,000 papers funded by the Department of Defense included Chinese co-authors with direct ties to China's defense research and industrial base. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP)
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After consulting with the investigative committee, Georgia Tech decided to dissolve the joint research institute and scale back its collaboration with Tianjin University.
Georgia Tech announced earlier this month that its affiliation with Tianjin was “unsustainable” after the university was blacklisted by the Department of Commerce.
A committee aide said that after the report was released, Berkeley announced it would give up ownership of a Chinese lab, citing a lack of transparency about research being conducted by affiliates of other institutions.
The committee found “serious failures” in reporting foreign funding by Georgia Tech and Berkeley and alleged that enforcement of foreign donation reporting under the Biden administration has been a “total failure.”
“The Biden-Harris Department of Education has not initiated a single enforcement action under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act in the past four years, despite widespread evidence of underreporting,” the report states.
“These undisclosed foreign donations, potentially totaling hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars, provide troubling and non-transparent influence to Chinese government agencies and contribute to research relationships that pose risks to U.S. national security.”
The report also recommended passage of the Deterrence Act, which passed the House last year but has not yet been considered by the Senate, which would expand government oversight and reporting requirements for foreign educational institutions.
Republicans argue that the information could be used as a weapon against the United States in the event of war with China. (KuiXinhua/People's Liberation Army/Chinese military/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“We must also ban research collaborations with blacklisted entities, enact stricter restrictions on emerging technology research, and hold American universities accountable by passing containment legislation,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the China Subcommittee, said in a statement.
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Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Ill.), chair of the Education and Labor Committee, said her committee has long “advocated for greater transparency regarding foreign investment in American universities.”
“This investigation only further proves why this is necessary,” Fox said. “Our research universities have a responsibility not to be complicit in the Chinese Communist Party's brutal human rights violations and attempts to undermine our national security.”
