Stop building China’s military with US tax dollars

Speaking in Guangzhou, China, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently declared that “President Biden and I firmly reject the idea that the United States should decouple from China.” She added that “when needed” the U.S. would deploy its economic tools “in a narrowly targeted manner to protect our national security and that of our allies.”  

To Yellen, China remains a valuable and trusted partner. That trust appears to be misplaced. 

Days ago, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a long-awaited joint report on the vulnerability of our research innovations. Its chilling title alone should alarm the American people: “CCP ON THE QUAD: How American Taxpayers and Universities Fund the [Chinese Communist Party’s] Advanced Military and Technological Research.” 

It revealed that the Department of Defense funded more than 2,000 scientific research papers with Chinese collaborators who were directly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s defense research and industrial base. 

The research collaborations involved “emerging technologies” related to hypersonic and fourth-generation nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, advanced lasers, high-performance explosives and rocket fuels and robotics.  

Chinese weapons improved by those federally funded collaborations are now aimed at us and our allies. 

Besides its military threat, China is now meddling in our elections. 

The Department of Justice’s top national security official recently warned of China’s “malign influence activities” to affect our elections. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen revealed that China “is focused on influencing down-ballot races — congressional races in particular — focusing on candidates that it views as particularly threatening to core [Chinese] security interests.”

More than two years ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of China’s attempts to influence our elected officials and described the emerging threat as combining “the surveillance nightmare of East Germany” with the “tech of Silicon Valley.” Access to the U.S. research enterprise is helping China build that monster. 

Wray has repeatedly warned about China targeting America’s university research innovations. Last April, he warned of the Chinese Communist Party’s “broad and unrelenting” threat to our “critical infrastructure” in academia and the private sector, warning that China has tried to pilfer “intellectual property, technology, and research” from nearly every American industry.  

None of these warnings are new. More than five years ago, Wray argued that the U.S. needed a “whole-of-society” response to China’s threat, then describing China’s access to U.S. government-funded research innovations.  

The government’s response since 2021? The Justice Department ended its China Initiative, which had focused the agency’s investigative resources on thwarting China’s nefarious efforts. Investigations of university research disclosure failures that largely began during the Trump administration have moved at a snail’s pace under Biden, with several concluding just recently. (See the Justice Department’s settlements with the University of Maryland, Stanford and the Cleveland Clinic.)

The Education Department downgraded its foreign funding disclosure responsibilities by shifting oversight from its General Counsel’s office to a component with no subject matter expertise: Federal Student Aid. The nomenclature changed, too. “Civil investigations” into university foreign funding disclosure failures are now merely “compliance reviews.”   

A memorandum issued by Trump and retained by Biden, in Jan. 2021 federal agencies were directed to strengthen protections against foreign theft of federally funded research.  

But it took until July for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to finally issue guidelines for implementing research security obligations to federal agencies (occurring almost 2 years after the CHIPS and Science Act’s enhanced requirements for NSF-led research security risk mitigation). 

Importantly, the House has a bipartisan appreciation of China’s mounting threat. Last December, 246 Republicans and Democrats voted for the DETERRENT Act, which would significantly tighten foreign funding disclosure requirements for universities, particularly involving countries of concern — China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Unfortunately, the Senate has failed to even schedule a vote on this bipartisan bill.

Inexplicably, five years after Wray identified the need, there is no whole-of-government response to China’s clear and growing threat. 

Many (though not all) prominent research universities, addicted to foreign funding and scientific collaborations with talented Chinese researchers, often oppose further disclosure requirements and show little sense of obligation to the taxpayers who provide about $55 billion in federal research dollars annually.  

If federally funded scientific collaborations were helping to build the military might of Russia, the groundswell of outrage would be immediate. Hearings would be held. Further research collaborations with Russia would be statutorily banned. The president would demand as much. 

But the same political grandees who bray endlessly about Russia — an adversary which poses far lesser economic and military threats to the U.S. — rarely find their voices when it comes to confronting Chinese aggression. 

Why? Vladimir Lenin supposedly predicted that capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them.

As described in a groundbreaking report last May, “U.S. asset managers and index providers are actively funneling billions of dollars of U.S. investor capital to Chinese Communist Party companies, including Chinese firms that have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for human rights abuses and that are helping to modernize China’s People’s Liberation Army.” 

Similarly, many university endowments are heavily invested in China. Our universities also frequently have valuable contracts with Chinese businesses and universities. 

Lenin couldn’t have imagined that we would pay for the rope, too.  

Despite appearances, the U.S. is not helpless to protect itself and its taxpayer-funded research innovations. 

The Senate should immediately pass the DETERRENT Act.  

Then, with the support of this or the next president, Congress should prohibit recipients of federal funds from engaging in scientific collaborations with Chinese researchers if the research may be used to benefit the advancement of China’s army. 

Paul R. Moore, former chief investigative counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, is a former assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and is a senior fellow at the Prague Security Studies Institute.