China is exploiting U.S. government-funded research and partnerships between American and Chinese universities — including some with explicit links to the Chinese military — to gain “back-door access” to insights on advanced technology breakthroughs, according to a new congressional report reviewed by The Washington Times.
The report was produced by Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. It focuses specifically on the transfer of technology research with sensitive defense applications.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade” have helped the Chinese Communist Party “achieve advancements in dual-use, critical, and emerging technologies like hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, fourth generation nuclear weapons technology and semiconductor technology,” states a summary of the report.
The full report was set to be released later Monday. According to the summary, the document uncovers a “sophisticated system” through which China is transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to entities on a Commerce Department blacklist that are “linked to China’s defense and security apparatus.”
The document does not say any American universities or researchers have broken laws but asserts that a “lack of legal guardrails around federally funded research” has played directly into China’s strategic goal of outpacing the U.S. and its allies in the race to dominate emerging technology.
Investigators focused specifically on research publications that have disclosed funding from the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. They also included collaboration between U.S. researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese institutions and universities.
“The purpose that research funding is to generate advancements that will eventually become applied warfighting and intelligence capabilities to protect America against adversarial nations,” the summary of the report states. “Yet the research that the [Department of Defense] and the [intelligence community] are funding is providing back-door access to the very foreign adversary nation whose aggression these capabilities are necessary to protect against.”
Investigators say they identified nearly 9,000 research publications supported by Defense Department funding and published with co-authors affiliated with Chinese government-linked institutions, as well as 185 publications supported by funding from U.S. intelligence agencies.
The report’s summary refers to China by its formal name, the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, and the Chinese military as the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA. “More than 2,000 DOD-funded papers included PRC [co-authors] who were directly affiliated with the PRC’s defense research and industrial base,” it states. “Some topics have direct military applications — such as high-performance explosives, tracking of targets, and drone operation networks — that the PLA would use against the U.S. military in the event of a conflict.”
With regard to circumventing U.S. government blacklists, the report describes a system through which Beijing uses “joint institutes between U.S. research universities and universities and other entities” inside China as a “guise of academic cooperation.”
Investigators highlight three such joint institutes: the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), which involves a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley, and Shenzen Institute in China; the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute (GTSI); and the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (SCUPI).
“These joint institutes facilitate the transfer of expertise, applied research, and technologies related to dual-use, critical, and emerging technologies to the PRC,” the report’s summary states. “Through these institutes, participating American academics, many of whom conduct U.S. federally-funded research, travel to the PRC to collaborate on research, advise PRC scholars, teach and train PRC graduate students, and collaborate with PRC companies on their areas of expertise — frequently, critical and emerging technologies with national security implications.
“While doing so, academics typically maintain affiliations with their U.S. institutions, and many continue to lead U.S. federally funded R&D projects. This creates a direct pipeline for the transfer of the benefit of their research expertise to the PRC.”
The summary notes that after months of “productive engagement” with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Select Committee on the CCP, Georgia Tech recently terminated GTSI and curtailed its partnership with China’s Tianjin University.
Berkeley has also “informed the Committees that it ‘has started the process of relinquishing all ownership’ in TBSI, and is ‘in the early stages of unwinding the joint legal entity,’” states the summary of the report, which described the developments and steps in the right direction.
A statement published on Georgia Tech’s website this month announced the termination and acknowledged that Tianjin University has been on the Commerce Department’s blacklist since 2020. “Given Georgia Tech’s extensive role in national security, it immediately began conducting a thorough review of all its activities and partnerships in China,” Georgia Tech wrote in a statement dated Sept. 6.
“To date, Tianjin University remains on the Entity List, making Georgia Tech’s participation with Tianjin University, and subsequently GTSI, no longer tenable,” the statement said. “The approximately 300 admitted students currently in degree programs at GTSI will have the opportunity to fulfill their degree requirements.”
Rep. John Moolenaar, Michigan Republican and chairman of the Select Committee on the CCP, said in a statement that “Georgia Tech did the right thing for U.S. national security by shutting down its PRC-based joint institute, and U.C. Berkeley and other universities should follow suit.”
“We also must ban research collaboration with blacklisted entities, enact stricter guardrails on emerging technology research, and hold American universities accountable through passing the Deterrent Act,” Mr. Moolenaar said. He was referring to legislation that aims to expand federal government oversight and U.S. university disclosure requirements relating to foreign sources and institutes of higher education.
The legislation was passed by the House last year and is awaiting action in the Senate.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Republican and chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, also called for the Deterrent Act to be made law.
She said in a statement that her committee has for years “pushed for greater transparency regarding foreign investment in American universities.”
“This investigation just further proved why it’s necessary,” Ms. Foxx said. “Our research universities have a responsibility to avoid any complicity in the CCP’s atrocious human rights abuses or attempts to undermine our national security.”
The New York Times, which first reported on the joint congressional report on Monday, said Georgia Tech and Berkeley had disputed many of the report’s findings.
The newspaper also reported that it had received a statement Friday from Berkeley, saying it had decided to terminate its ownership in the Chinese Institution, partly because of its lack of visibility into research by affiliates of other institutions.
The joint congressional report, meanwhile, cited failures in the reporting of foreign funding by U.C. Berkeley and Georgia Tech under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.
The report’s summary also criticized the Biden administration. “Enforcement of foreign gift and contract reporting requirements by the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been an abject failure,” the report’s summary states. “And the Biden-Harris Department of Education has failed to open a single enforcement action under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act in the last four years, despite widespread evidence of lack of reporting.
“These undisclosed foreign gifts — likely hundreds of millions, if not billions in total — give PRC entities troubling influence without transparency and contribute to building the research relationships that pose risks to U.S. national security,” it states. “Stronger safeguards and more robust enforcement is urgently required.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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