A congressional report argues that Beijing has exploited ties with American universities to advance technologically, and that further guardrails are needed.
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Republican members of two House committees recommended curtailing the ability of researchers who receive U.S. grants to work with Chinese universities and companies that have military ties.
A House committee focused on threats from China argued in a report released on Monday that U.S. federal research funding had helped to advance Chinese technologies with military applications, helping to fuel a potential national security rival to the United States.
The report argues that Chinese partnerships with U.S.-funded researchers and joint collaborations between Chinese and American universities have helped to propel Beijing’s advancements in fields like hypersonic and nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. The report concludes that these developments may one day influence how the two nations perform on the battlefield.
The report — put out by the Republican members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce — also recommends stricter guidelines around federally funded research, including significantly curtailing the ability of researchers who receive U.S. grants to work with Chinese universities and companies that have military ties.
Part of the report focuses on several joint China-based institutes between Chinese and American universities, including one by the University of California, Berkeley, and another with the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Both Berkeley and Georgia Tech disputed many of the report’s findings. But in a statement to The New York Times on Friday, Berkeley said it had decided to terminate its ownership in the Chinese institute, in part because of its lack of visibility into research being conducted there by affiliates of other institutions.
Georgia Tech also announced this month that it would discontinue its participation in its joint institute and work to end its degree programs in China, saying the inclusion of its Chinese partner on a restricted U.S. trade list had made the cooperation “untenable.”
Growing tensions between the United States and China have called into question many kinds of academic and commercial relationships that were formerly encouraged by both countries.
The United States remains a global leader in science and technology, but China’s capacity has leaped ahead in certain areas like materials science, hypersonics and nanotechnology. The Chinese government has said its scientific advancements serve an important purpose in helping it build its military.
If the report’s recommendations are adopted, it could significantly curtail the number of scientific collaborations between the world’s largest economies.
U.S. rules on such cooperation with China and other adversarial countries now draw a bright line between fundamental research, which seeks to advance basic scientific understanding in an array of fields and remains unregulated, and applied research, which uses that knowledge to develop specific technologies and applications and faces certain security restrictions.
The House committee report argues that for technologies that may have military and commercial applications, even fundamental research collaborations have led to significant Chinese breakthroughs that could harm U.S. national security.
The report identifies nearly 9,000 research publications released over the past decade that were supported by funding from the Defense Department or the U.S. intelligence community, and included co-authors affiliated with institutions in China. More than 2,000 of those included co-authors directly affiliated with the Chinese military research and industrial base, the report said.
The vast majority of those papers pertained to so-called dual-use technologies valuable to both the military and the commercial sector, the report said. Some of the subjects had direct military applications, like high performance explosives and rocket fuels, tracking of underwater targets and coordinated drone operation.
The report gave six case studies in which researchers who received U.S. federal funding helped to advance China’s nuclear weapons technology or its capabilities in artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, semiconductors and robotics.
“The troubling conclusion then is that Defense Department-funded research — intended to allow the U.S. military to maintain a technological edge over its adversaries — has likely been used to enable and strengthen” the Chinese military, the report said.
The report also looked at three joint U.S.-China academic institutions, including the programs run by Georgia Tech and Berkeley. It argued that these joint institutes served as channels to transfer expertise, applied research and technologies to China, and that the U.S. universities had made lapses in reporting Chinese funding sources to the federal government.
Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the China committee, said in a statement that the results of the investigation were “alarming.”
“The Chinese Communist Party is driving its military advancements through U.S. taxpayer funded research and through joint U.S.-P.R.C. institutes in China,” he said, using the abbreviation for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China. He commended Georgia Tech for shutting down its Chinese institute and said other universities should follow.
“We also must ban research collaboration with blacklisted entities, enact stricter guardrails on emerging technology research, and hold American universities accountable” by passing new legislation, he said.
Abbigail Tumpey, the vice president of communications at Georgia Tech, said the work at the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, or G.T.S.I., “was focused on educating students, not on research.”
“As Georgia Tech has told the committee for months, there was no research conducted at G.T.S.I., no facilitation of technology transfer and no federal funding provided to China, and the report provides no facts to support its unsubstantiated claims on these fronts,” she said.
Ms. Tumpey said on Friday that Georgia Tech carried out its own review into the cooperation shortly after its Chinese partner, Tianjin University, was added to the entity list in 2020 because it was accused of stealing U.S. trade secrets. Georgia Tech found no security concerns, but implemented additional safeguards, she said.
However, after watching as Congress considered new restrictions that would block U.S. institutions that had partnerships with firms on the entity list from access to federal funding, the university decided to end its partnership. “The writing was on the wall for us that this entire landscape has changed,” she said.
Katherine Yelick, the vice chancellor for research at Berkeley, said that its researchers engaged “only in research whose results are always openly disseminated around the world,” and that it was not aware of any research by Berkeley faculty at the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute for any other purpose.
She said Berkeley had decided to relinquish its ownership in a nonprofit that owns the Chinese institute after “careful consideration beginning several months ago.”
“The university continuously re-evaluates and responds to the risks and benefits posed by foreign engagement and takes concerns about research security very seriously — including those concerns voiced by Congress,” she said.
Berkeley said it was also reviewing other aspects of its collaboration with Tsinghua University, like student and researcher exchanges and sponsored research projects.
The measures the report advocated include restrictions on the activities of federally funded researchers that would chill U.S.-China scientific collaboration. While the number of U.S. academics and students in China is more limited, Chinese nationals make up a significant proportion of the work force in American laboratories, and in 2020, 17 percent of the doctoral degrees in science and engineering awarded in the United States went to students from China.
The report accused the Biden administration of lax enforcement of foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements, and called for stronger oversight and enforcement. It also pushed for new prohibitions on cooperation between federally funded researchers and people and organizations affiliated with the Chinese military. The effects of such restrictions could be significant, since many major Chinese companies and universities have some exposure to the country’s military industry.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. More about Ana Swanson
See more on: U.S. Politics, Georgia Institute of Technology, House Committee on Education and Labor, Communist Party of China, Defense Budget, Republican Party
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Source: nytimes.com
