A House committee focused on the China threat argues in a new report that federal research funding is helping develop Chinese technology for military use, emboldening a potential rival to the United States in national security.
The report argues that China’s partnerships with U.S.-funded researchers and universities are facilitating Beijing’s advances in areas such as hypersonic weapons, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and semiconductors, and that these developments could affect the two countries’ battlefield performance in the future.
The report, released by Republicans on the House Select Committee on China and the Education and Labor Committee, also recommended stricter guidelines for federally funded research, including significantly restricting the ability of researchers receiving U.S. grants to collaborate with Chinese universities and companies with ties to the military.
Part of the report focuses on several China-based collaborations between Chinese and American universities, including those with the University of California, Berkeley and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Both Berkeley and Georgia Tech disputed many of the report’s findings, but Berkeley said in a statement to The New York Times on Friday that it decided to abandon its ownership of the Chinese lab, in part because Berkeley had insufficient visibility into the research being conducted there by affiliates of other research institutions.
Georgia Tech also announced this month that it would end its participation in a joint institute and work to end its degree programs in China, saying the inclusion of its Chinese partner on a U.S. restricted trade list made the collaboration “unsustainable.”
Rising tensions between the United States and China are calling into question the various academic and commercial relationships that the two countries have traditionally encouraged.
While the United States remains the world leader in science and technology, China’s capabilities have grown exponentially in certain areas, such as materials science, hypersonics and nanotechnology. Beijing says its scientific advances will play a key role in strengthening its military.
If the report’s recommendations are adopted, the amount of scientific collaboration between the world’s largest economies could be significantly reduced.
U.S. rules on cooperation with China and other adversaries currently draw a clear line between basic research, which is unregulated and aims to improve understanding of fundamental science, and applied research, which uses that knowledge to develop specific technologies or applications and is subject to certain national security constraints.
The House committee report argues that cooperation on basic research, even on technologies with potential military or commercial applications, could lead to significant Chinese advances that could harm U.S. national security.
The report identified nearly 9,000 research papers published in the past decade that were funded by the Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence agencies and included co-authors affiliated with Chinese institutions, including more than 2,000 with co-authors directly affiliated with China’s military research and industrial base, the report said.
Most of the papers, according to the report, were about so-called dual-use technologies that have value to both the military and commercial sectors, and some had direct military applications, such as high explosives, rocket fuel, underwater target tracking and coordinated drone operations.
The report outlined six examples of how federally funded researchers have helped improve China’s nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, semiconductors and robotics capabilities.
“The disturbing conclusion is that research funded by the Department of Defense to help the U.S. military maintain a technological advantage over its adversaries has likely been used to support and strengthen the Chinese military,” the report said.
The report also investigated three joint U.S.-China academic institutions, including programs run by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Berkeley, which it alleged served as conduits for the transfer of expertise, applied research and technology to China and that U.S. universities had failed to report Chinese funding sources to the government.
Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the China committee, said in a statement that the findings were “alarming.”
“The Chinese Communist Party promotes military power through U.S. taxpayer-funded research and joint U.S.-China laboratories in China,” he said, using an abbreviation for China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China. He praised Georgia Tech for closing the Chinese lab and said other universities should follow suit.
“We must also hold American universities accountable by passing new laws banning research collaborations with blacklisted entities and instituting stricter guardrails on emerging technology research,” he said.
Georgia Tech Vice President for Public Affairs Abigail Tampey said the work at the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute (GTSI) was “focused on student education, not research.”
“As Georgia Tech has told the committee for months, no research is conducted at GTSI, no technology transfer is facilitated, and no federal funding is provided to China. The report provides no facts to support its unsubstantiated assertions on these points,” she said.
Tampy said Georgia Tech conducted an investigation into the collaboration shortly after its Chinese partner, Tianjin University, was added to the Entity List for allegedly stealing U.S. trade secrets in 2020. Georgia Tech found no security concerns but has implemented additional security measures, he said.
But after seeing Congress considering new regulations that would block federal funding to U.S. institutions that partner with companies on the Entity List, the university decided to end the partnership. “It was a clear sign to us that the whole situation had changed,” she said.
Berkeley Vice Provost for Research Katherine Yelick said her university’s researchers are “always engaged in research results that are published for the world to see” and that she was not aware of any Berkeley faculty conducting research at Tsinghua’s Berkeley Shenzhen Lab for any other purposes.
She said Berkeley had decided to divest its ownership of the Chinese lab after “careful consideration over the past few months.”
“The University continually reevaluates and responds to the risks and benefits posed by foreign engagements and takes concerns about the security of our research very seriously, including those expressed by Congress,” she said.
Berkeley said it is also exploring other aspects of its collaboration with Tsinghua, including student and researcher exchanges and research support.
The report criticized the Biden administration for not enforcing rules on the disclosure of foreign gifts and contracts and called for increased oversight. It also called for banning federally funded researchers from working with individuals or organizations with ties to the Chinese military. The impact of such restrictions could be significant, as many major Chinese companies and universities have some kind of ties to the defense industry.
“Our research universities have a responsibility to not be complicit in the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal human rights violations and attempts to undermine our national security,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Education Committee, said of the Chinese Communist Party.
But Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, argued that restrictions on basic research could backfire and end up harming US national security — for example, by excluding American scientists from areas where China already has a lead, or by discouraging foreign scientists from working in the US.
While the number of U.S. scholars and students in China is limited, Chinese people make up a significant portion of the workforce in U.S. laboratories, and in 2020, 17% of science and engineering doctorates awarded in the United States were awarded to students from China.
“I think you have to be careful,” Smith said. “You might have more to lose than you gain.”
