WASHINGTON (AP) — University partnerships between the U.S. and China over the past decade have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to help Beijing develop critical technologies that could be used for military purposes, Republican lawmakers allege in a new report.
The report noted that U.S. researchers have collaborated with their Chinese counterparts in areas including hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, nuclear technology and semiconductor technology, and that U.S. taxpayer money has contributed to China’s technological advances and military modernization.
A report released Monday by Republicans on the House Select Committee on China and the Education and Labor Committee expressed concern about national security risks to the once-praised scientific collaboration and called for stronger safeguards and stricter enforcement.
The committee conducted a year-long investigation into the role of higher education in economic competition with China, particularly in the area of technology. While U.S. universities do not engage in secret research projects, that research is often among the best in the world and could be diverted to military use.
The US House of Representatives approved around two dozen China-related bills this month with the explicit aim of competing with Beijing in the technology sector. The bills, which still need to be approved by the Senate, aim to ban Chinese-made drones, restrict Chinese biotech companies from the US market, cut off remote Chinese access to advanced US-made computer chips, and more.
Other measures include curbing Beijing’s influence on U.S. college campuses and reviving Trump-era programs aimed at rooting out Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft at U.S. universities and research institutions, even as those efforts raise concerns about racial profiling and whether exchange programs meant to promote tolerance between the two countries can continue.
Collaboration between US-based scholars and China also declined as a result of the Trump administration’s counterespionage program, which ended in 2022, according to the researchers.
Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a Council on Foreign Relations forum earlier this year that he welcomed more Chinese students studying humanities and social sciences in American schools, but “not particle physics.”
Abigail Coplin, an assistant professor of sociology and the society of science and technology at Vassar College, expressed concern about the potential negative impact on academic exchange and scientific engagement that is supposed to foster understanding and help stabilize relationships.
“Obviously, U.S. federal funds should not be used to build up China’s military, but we also need to have more conversations about non-national security issues and the negative effects of excessive securitization,” Koplin said. “The decline in people-to-people contact is one of the reasons for the current rapid deterioration of U.S.-China relations.”
Monday’s report identified nearly 8,800 publications in which U.S. researchers funded by the Defense Department or U.S. intelligence agencies collaborated with their Chinese counterparts, many of whom were connected to China’s defense research and industrial base. This research “provides backdoor access to the very foreign adversaries that these capabilities are meant to defend against,” the report said.
The House investigation also cited questionable joint laboratories between U.S. and Chinese universities, which the report said “concealed a sophisticated system for transferring critical U.S. technology and expertise to China.”
Through these institutes, U.S. researchers and scientists, including those conducting federally funded research, travel to China to collaborate with and advise Chinese scholars and train Chinese students, according to the report.
“This creates a direct pipeline for the transfer of the benefits of their research expertise to China,” the report said.
Georgia Tech named its Shenzhen laboratory in the report, but defended it, saying its work in China focuses on student education, not research, and that the report’s allegations are “baseless.”
“GTSI does not conduct research, facilitate technology transfer, or provide federal funding to China,” the university said in a statement.
But Georgia Tech announced on Sept. 6 that it was ending its participation in a joint research institute with Tianjin University and the government of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Georgia Tech said the partnership was “no longer tenable” after the U.S. Department of Commerce accused Tianjin University of stealing trade secrets in 2020.
The congressional report also mentions the Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, which the University of California, Berkeley, and China’s Tsinghua University opened in Shenzhen in 2015 to focus on “strategic emerging industries,” according to the institute’s website.
Berkeley researchers “are always engaged exclusively in research whose results are publicly available to the world,” Katherine Yelick, the university’s vice provost for research, said in a statement. “The university is not aware of any Berkeley faculty conducting research at TBSI for any other purpose.”
Berkeley also ended the partnership, citing its inability to oversee research activities conducted solely by non-Berkeley personnel at the joint institute.
“After careful consideration that began several months ago, the U.S. university has decided to begin the process of divesting all of its ownership interests in the Shenzhen campus,” Yelich said in a statement.
She said Berkeley “takes concerns about the safety of its research very seriously, including those expressed by Congress.”
The University of Pittsburgh, which was cited in the report as having cooperated with Sichuan University, said it could not comment because the university “was not consulted by or cooperated with the House Select Committee during its investigation.”
