Republicans Sound Alarm on Research Partnerships With China

Republican lawmakers want to enact stronger guardrails for research partnerships between American universities and China, purportedly to prevent the Communist power from exploiting federally funded research for its own strategic use, according to a report released Monday by the chairs of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the House education and workforce committee.

“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,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

The report marks the latest attempt by Republicans to make political hay out of efforts to curb China’s influence in the United States, in part by casting the Biden-Harris administration’s enforcement of research security rules as dangerously inadequate. The authors argue that the issue can only be rectified by passing partisan legislation that would create more stringent requirements for universities partnered with foreign institutions.

However, both former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have supported policies aimed at enhancing research security since 2018, when Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray told the Senate intelligence committee that higher education institutions are critical to combating China’s threats to American intelligence; Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have also both pledged to prioritize U.S. competition with China if they win the presidential election in November.

Beyond Washington, universities have also implemented a variety of new research security policies. According to the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents the nation’s leading research institutions and keeps a comprehensive list of institutional and federal efforts to protect research activity, member institutions have taken it upon themselves to enhance cybersecurity training and communications and bolster reviews of international contracts and gifts.

China’s Tech Threats

The lawmakers who authored the report claim that certain U.S.-China research partnerships have allowed China to “achieve technological breakthroughs,” including in areas that “the Chinese military could use against the U.S. military in the event of a conflict,” such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and semiconductor technology.

That’s happened in part because joint education institutes—such as the recently dissolved partnership between the University of California, Berkeley, and Tsinghua University and the University of Pittsburgh’s partnership with Sichuan University—operate “under the guise of academic cooperation,” the report said. “But in practice, they conceal a sophisticated system for transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to the PRC [People’s Republic of China], including to blacklisted entities linked to China’s defense and security apparatus.”

The report also claims that the arrangement has persisted in recent years because of the Biden-Harris administration’s “abject failure” to enforce Section 117 of the Higher Education Act—a 30-year-old law designed “to promote public transparency about the role of foreign funding in U.S. higher education,” according to the Education Department’s website.

The law requires universities to report twice a year all gifts or contracts from foreign sources valued at $250,000 or more. (An up-to-date collection of spreadsheets with that data—including the monetary values of grants and gifts from China—is easily accessible on the Education Department’s website.)

Is the Deterrent Act a Solution?

However, the Deterrent Act, which originated in the same committee that wrote the report and is currently stalled in the Senate, would lower the foreign gift reporting threshold for colleges and universities to $50,000 for most countries—and to zero for those of concern, including China. Noncompliant institutions would face fines and potential loss of Title IV funding.

The report released Monday recommends adopting that legislation and implores Congress to prohibit federally funded researchers from collaborating with “the highest-risk entities.”

House Republicans are also pointing to the report’s findings as extra impetus for passing the Deterrent Act, despite objections from education groups such as the American Council on Education, which argued in a letter to House leadership that it will “broadly curtail important needed international research collaboration and academic and cultural exchanges.”

“Universities are not taking their reporting obligations seriously,” an aide for the education and workforce committee said at a news conference Monday, citing the report’s findings that joint education institutes at UC Berkeley and the Georgia Institute of Technology “failed to report their gifts and contracts in a timely way.”

Chair Virginia Foxx said the committee has been pushing “for greater transparency regarding foreign investment in American universities” for years, and the 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,” she said in a news release. “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.”

‘More Harm Than Good’?

But stemming the flow of scientific research could end up backfiring, “doing more harm than good to U.S. scientific competitiveness and national security,” said Tobin Smith, the AAU’s vice president for policy.

“Proposals that would aggressively limit international scientific collaborations often mistakenly assume that we are ahead of China and other countries in key areas of scientific research,” he said in an email. “But that isn’t the case in areas like artificial intelligence, and we have much to learn from scientific research being done by scientists in China and other countries.”

Although both Georgia Tech and UC Berkeley dissolved their partnerships with Chinese universities prior to the release of the report, in emails to Inside Higher Ed on Monday, they questioned some of its claims.

Abbigail Tumpey, vice president of communications at Georgia Tech, clarified that the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute (GTSI) was focused on educating students—not on research. She added that there “are no ‘failures’ in our reporting—nor does the report identify any. Georgia Tech's reporting has been up to date since well before the Committee started its investigation.”

“As the report itself states, U.S. policy and regulations have allowed and encouraged global academic collaboration for decades,” Tumpey wrote. “As Georgia Tech has told the Committee for months, there was no research conducted at GTSI, no facilitation of technology transfer, and no federal funding provided to China. The report provides no facts to support its unsubstantiated claims on these fronts” (bold in original).

It closed GTSI anyway because its Chinese partner, Tianjin University, is on the federal government’s Entity List, “making Georgia Tech’s participation with Tianjin University, and subsequently Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, no longer tenable,” she said.

Katherine Yelick, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research, said university researchers “engage only in research whose results are always openly disseminated around the world.” She added that she isn’t “aware of any research by Berkeley faculty at TBSI [Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute] conducted for any other purpose.”

But she said that because Berkeley has no oversight of the research TBSI conducts with outside partners, the university decided to relinquish ownership in the institute. “The University continuously reevaluates 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.”

The fate of the University of Pittsburgh’s partnership with Sichuan University, which the report accused of serving “as a talent recruitment mechanism for the PRC,” isn’t as clear.

“The University of Pittsburgh was not consulted and did not work with the House Select Committee throughout the investigation,” Jared Stonesifer, senior director of external communications at Pitt, said in an email. “Accordingly, we cannot immediately verify the accuracy of the information reported regarding the Sichuan University–Pittsburgh Institute (SCUPI), nor can we provide comment at this time.”