House Republicans argue in a new congressional report that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding over the last decade has contributed to China’s military technological advancements.
Collaborations between U.S. and Chinese academics have led to research publications related to advanced research on topics like hypersonics, directed energy, nuclear and high energy physics, and artificial intelligence and autonomy.
That information, Republicans argue, could be weaponized against the U.S. in the event of war with China. Some of the collaborative research they identified related to military applications like high-performance explosives, tracking of targets and drone operation networks.
The House Select Committee on China Competition, together with the Education and Workforce Committee, found some 9,000 joint research publications that were funded either through the Department of Defense (DOD) or the Intelligence Community (IC) published by co-authors with ties to China’s "defense and security apparatus," including entities that are on a Commerce Department blacklist.
"The purpose of that research funding is to generate advancements that will eventually become applied warfighting and intelligence capabilities to protect America against adversarial nations," a summary of the report states. "Yet the research that the DOD and the IC are funding is providing back-door access to the very foreign adversary nation whose aggression these capabilities are necessary to protect against."
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More than 2,000 DOD-funded papers included Chinese co-authors who were directly affiliated with China's defense research and industrial base, according to the report.
The report recommends stricter guidelines around federally funded research, including cutting back on the ability of researchers who receive U.S. grants to work with Chinese universities and companies that have military ties.
Under the guise of academic cooperation, the committees say China has orchestrated a campaign to pair with prestigious U.S. universities to transfer U.S. technologies and expertise back to China and circumvent government blackists.
In six case studies, covering research institutions including Carnegie Institution’s Earth & Planets Laboratory, UCLA and U.C. Berkeley, lawmakers found Chinese researchers who collaborated with U.S. academia and took knowledge they learned back home to help China "achieve advancements in fourth-generation nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, graphene semiconductors, and robotics."
Three such collaborations are the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute and Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Under the joint institutes, American academics, many of whom conduct federally funded research, travel to China to collaborate on research, advise Chinese scholars, teach Chinese students and advise companies on their expertise.
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After engaging with the committees on the investigation, Georgia Tech decided to dissolve its joint institute and cut back its collaboration with Tianjin University.
Georgia Tech announced earlier this month that partnering with Tianjin had become "untenable" due to the university’s spot on the Commerce Department blacklist.
A committee aide revealed that after the report came out, Berkeley announced it would terminate its ownership of the Chinese institute, in part due to a lack of transparency around research being conducted by affiliates of other institutions.
The committees uncovered "significant failures" in the reporting of foreign funding by Georgia Tech and Berkeley and claimed enforcement of the foreign gift reporting under the Biden administration had been an "abject failure."
"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," the report said.
"These undisclosed foreign gifts — likely hundreds of millions, if not billions in total — gives PRC entities troubling influence without transparency and contribute to building the research relationships that pose risks to U.S. national security."
The report also recommended passage of the Deterrent Act, a bill that passed the House last year but has yet to be taken up by the Senate. It would expand government oversight and reporting requirements related to foreign institutes in education.
"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," Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich.., chairman of the China subcommittee said in a statement.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., chair of the committee on Education and Workforce, said her committee for years had "pushed for greater transparency regarding foreign investment in American universities."
"This investigation just further proved why it’s necessary," 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."
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