Report: U.S. professors are powering the PRC’s technological advancements, including in dual-use military technologies, with US taxpayer funding.
In six case studies, covering research institutions including UCLA and U.C. Berkeley, the US lawmakers illustrate how the People's Republic of China defense and security establishment benefits from technological advances developed by federally funded US researchers
CCP ON THE QUAD: How American Taxpayers and Universities Fund the CCP’s Advanced Military and Technological Research by the Select Committee on the CCP, September 23, 2024
The following highlights are quoted from the Select Committee Report:
Following a year-long investigation, Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) of the House Education and Workforce Committee uncovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade has contributed to China’s technological advancements and military modernization.
Through nearly 9,000 joint research publications, funded by the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community, the lawmakers discovered that Americans worked with Chinese researchers on strategic technology research, much of which has military applications. These papers covered topics like high-performance explosives, tracking of targets, and drone operation networks, nuclear and high-energy physics, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and hypersonics – the kind of technology that the Chinese military could use against the U.S. military in the event of a conflict.
In six case studies, covering research institutions including UCLA and U.C. Berkeley, the lawmakers illustrate how the People's Republic of China defense and security establishment benefits from technological advances developed by federally funded US researchers. Those six researchers leveraged expertise, applied knowledge, and practical capabilities developed through and during years of receiving federal funding to the PRC’s advantage, helping the PRC achieve advancements in fourth- generation nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, graphene semiconductors, and robotics.
The lawmakers also uncovered that US-Chinese joint education institutes like U.C. Berkeley’s partnership with Tsinghua University, and the University of Pittsburgh's partnership with Sichuan University, serve as conduits for transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to China, including to entities linked to China’s defense machine and the security apparatus it uses to facilitate human rights abuses.
“The results of our joint investigation are alarming. The Chinese Communist Party is driving its military advancements through US taxpayer-funded research and through joint US-PRC institutes in China. Georgia Tech did the right thing for US national security by shutting down its PRC-based joint institute, and UC 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,” Chairman Moolenaar.
“For years, the Committee on Education and the Workforce has pushed for greater transparency regarding foreign investment in American universities, and this investigation just further proved why it’s necessary. 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. It’s time for any school with this type of partnership to cut all ties, it’s time to make the DETERRENT Act law, and it’s time to get serious about countering China,” Chairwoman Foxx.
“To win the future and beat the Chinese Communist Party in developing next generation technology, we must stop government research that bolsters our adversaries' military and intelligence-gathering capabilities. I’m grateful Chairman Moolenaar and Chairwoman Foxx for their investigative work,” Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits federally funded research and partnerships between U.S. universities and People’s Republic of China (PRC) defense-linked universities to achieve technological breakthroughs, both in technologies with military applications and in critical and emerging technologies where the PRC lags behind the U.S. and its allies.
Case Study: University of California, Berkeley and Tsinghua University
University of California, Berkeley’s partnership with Tsinghua University, known as the Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), is expressly focused on commercializing research. In practice, this means that through this partnership, U.S. expertise and technological capabilities developed by U.S. professors—many of whom have received or are receiving federal funding—are powering the PRC’s technological advancements, including in dual-use areas.
In a particularly troubling example, a researcher who was on leave from UC Berkeley starting in 2018 and resigned from the university in 2020, leveraged years of federally funded research to start a PRC-based company named Berxel that created breakthrough laser technology. While receiving federal funding, the researcher participated in Chinese talent programs like the Chang Jiang Scholars Program, and served as a Chair Professor at Tsinghua University.
The researcher used support from a DOD National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship that ran through 2014—shortly before cofounding TBSI in 2015—to explore the technology now offered by Berxel for use in PRC data centers and AI computing. Fellowship grantees receive up to $3 million in federal funding. In 2017, a TBSI press release touted that the researcher’s research team had achieved “new breakthroughs” in laser semiconductor technology.
The researcher established Berxel— which is focused on that same technology—the next year, in 2018. 90 Intellectual property filings shifted to Berxel as well—the researcher’s teams’ initial patents were filed through the University of California (2018-19); 91 numerous filings followed under Berxel between 2022 to 2024.
University of California, Berkeley failed to properly disclose Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI)-related gifts or contracts from the PRC government throughout the eight years that it has been partnering with Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government at TBSI.
Berkeley contends that TBSI is a separate legal entity from the university and that any foreign gifts or contracts to TBSI did not and do not fall within the section 117 reporting requirements. However, the structure and function of TBSI is that of an intermediary —an entity working under the auspices of, or on behalf of, UC Berkeley. Further, an intermediary under section 117 “may be a legal entity other than an institution that receives a gift originating from or enters into a contract with a foreign source, and then passes to an institution part or all of the benefit of the gift from or contract with the foreign source.” As an intermediary, TBSI is a legal entity other than an HEA “institution of higher education,” such as UC Berkeley, which should have triggered UC Berkeley’s reporting requirement. TBSI has received gifts originating from Chinese-affiliated entities or has otherwise entered into contracts with foreign sources and passed on to UC Berkeley part or all of the benefits of the gifts or contracts. This has occurred through joint research and education, faculty and student exchanges, and the design of new multidisciplinary research programs, novel graduate curricula, and education programs in science and technology. Both Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley hold equal interests in TBSI, and each have a 50 percent interest in all revenue generated by inventions owned by TBSI and all other assets generated or created by TBSI.
As the name Tsinghua-Berkeley implies, UC Berkeley was directly involved with the creation of TBSI and remains engaged in its management. The president of UC Berkeley serves as co-chair of TBSI, along with the president of Tsinghua University and the mayor of Shenzhen. UC Berkeley maintains a direct link to TBSI on TBSI’s website. No other American universities are listed or involved in the leadership, creating the appearance of a specific and exclusive partnership between UC Berkeley and TBSI. The existence of the Tsinghua-Berkeley Center at Berkeley, California, the Berkeley-Tsinghua Center at Tsinghua, China, the use of UC Berkeley’s name in each of the Centers’ names, and the various related UC Berkeley agreements further demonstrate UC Berkeley’s intimate involvement with, and benefit from, gifts and contracts with TBSI.
Notably, UC Berkeley received nearly $22 million from Tsinghua University’s U.S.-based entity, the Tsinghua Education Foundation North America (TEFNA) to assist with TBSI. This includes two $1.5 million gifts received in 2015 and 2016 and a subsequent $19 million sponsored research agreement. In UC Berkeley’s October 6, 2023, oversight response to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, UC Berkeley admitted that it did not report to the Department the section 117 gifts from, or contracts with, TEFNA in a timely manner because UC Berkeley “did not initially recognize TEFNA as a foreign source due to its status as a US entity.” Yet, Department guidance clearly provides that “[w]hen evaluating whether a subsidiary or affiliate is an agent of a foreign source with respect to the transaction at issue, institutions may not simply assume that all transactions with U.S.-based counterparties fall outside the scope of Section 117.” UC Berkeley acknowledged it has “since improved” its reporting process for gifts and contracts. However, the lack of timely reporting prevented the public and the Department from becoming aware of TEFNA as a foreign source of gifts, as well as contracts, until several years after the fact. Additionally, the Department also recommends colleges and universities demonstrate increased due diligence “the first time an institution or intermediary enters into a large transaction.” Despite TEFNA’s two gifts of $1.5 million each equaling more than five times the section 117 threshold of $250,000, there is no indication UC Berkeley carefully scrutinized whether TEFNA might constitute a “foreign source.” Millions in foreign funds flowed through TBSI and TEFNA to the benefit of UC Berkeley. The structures of these contributions were similar to compliance scenarios provided by the Department, yet UC Berkeley still failed to report properly and timely the gifts and contracts as required by section 117.
PRC media has since described Berxel’s patented laser technology as a critical achievement which “broke the long-standing foreign technology monopoly” because it was the first of its kind “domestically developed and produced in China".
The researcher’s position at TBSI likely provided access to investors in the PRC, and in turn gave those investors access to the experience and technological capability the researcher developed through federal research funding. Today, Berxel has over a dozen PRC-based investors, t including firms that have invested in PRC companies that support the Chinese defense apparatus. Berxel’s products also have potential military applications. In fact, TBSI researchers published a paper in collaboration with China’s State Key Laboratory on High Power Semiconductor Lasers—a defense-oriented research institution— that emphasizes semiconductor lasers applications’ in “military defense […] fields.”
Case Study: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Dark Matter Artificial Intelligence
The potential military applications of cutting-edge artificial intelligence are
legion, covering capabilities from autonomous weapons systems to
reconnaissance, sensor, targeting, and manufacturing capabilities.
Over the course of three decades, a researcher received at least $30 million in
U.S. federal grants from agencies including the DOD, National Science
Foundation, and Office of Naval Research. The researcher was a professor at UCLA
from 2002 to 2020, and he directed UCLA’s Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning
and Autonomy (VCLA) from 2010 to 2020. VCLA works on advanced AI systems
and robotics, including projects with clear military applications. The researcher's
DOD-funded work explored high-level robot autonomy and cognitive robot
platforms for intelligence and surveillance.
While receiving federal funding, the researcher was recruited into multiple PRC
talent programs, built a PRC institute designed to transfer military technology to
the PRC, and took on senior roles with problematic PRC entities, including a
blacklisted defense university. As early as 2004, he was actively collaborating with the CCP to develop next generation military technologies. In 2013, the researcher began serving as an overseas advisor to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And in 2020, after taking a formal leave of absence from UCLA in November, he began conducting research and training PhD students at the Beijing Institute of Technology, one of the Seven Sons which was blacklisted by the U.S. government the same year.
In July 2017, the researcher leveraged knowledge gained from a half million dollar
NSF grant to found an AI startup in Los Angeles, but quickly moved the startup to the PRC. By 2018, it was headquartered in the PRC and known as Dark Matter Artificial Intelligence (Dark Matter, 暗物智能). The company, focusing on
human-machine interaction research, rapidly grew to a team of over 200, many of
whom were students and professors from UCLA, including former members of
the researcher’s research center. Dark Matter immediately attracted significant
investment, raking in more than $60 million from Chinese state-owned enterprises alone in the years following. It has rapidly expanded its technological footprint, filing over 100 patents since its inception. Key innovations include a “wheel-foot switching robot system,” “facial expression recognition” technology, and methods for “pedestrian re-identification across image and video modalities” and “abnormal event detection in monitoring scenarios.” The company’s R&D efforts appear to be accelerating.
By the fall of 2020, the researcher had returned to China full-time. He was
appointed as a Chair Professor at both Tsinghua University and Peking University,
two of China's most prestigious institutions—both supervised by SASTIND and
home to large defense-focused laboratories. He also founded the Beijing Institute
for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), a Chinese-state backed entity working
to build China’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) capability. BIGAI has recruited more than 30 top scientists educated at leading U.S. and UK research universities, many of whom were members of Researcher 2’s VCLA team or trained under U.S. government programs. Those still at VCLA continue to coauthor with staff at BIGAI.
BIGAI continues to benefit from federal funding in other ways as well.
Another BIGAI researcher previously received DOD grants and coauthored
several U.S. government-funded studies. And a quick public records search
reveals that BIGAI researchers have co-authored at least seven recent papers
funded by DARPA and/or ONR.
This continued collaboration across institutions—supported by the U.S.
federal government—serves to transfer sensitive applied expertise and
technological capabilities in precisely the areas in which the U.S. regulates the
transfer of the technologies, like AI, that may result. In other words, the U.S.
government is funding the PRC’s efforts to leapfrog past the U.S. in critical and
emerging technologies, raising significant national security concerns for the
United States.
The researcher has framed BIGAI’s mission in strategic national terms, likening it to China’s “Two Bombs and One Satellite” (两弹一星)” program in defense importance. In a March 2023 address to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPCC), he stated, “If China can be the first to achieve
a truly generally intelligent entity, it will become the ‘ace in the hole’ of international scientific and technological competition.” He called for AGI
development to be elevated to a national priority, coordinated by the central
government to “seize the commanding heights of global technology and industrial
development.”
This strategic positioning of BIGAI, combined with the researcher’s extensive
history of U.S. government-funded work and his ongoing connections to
American research institutions, raises significant concerns about the potential
transfer of sensitive technologies and knowledge.
Full Report with References
