Should Chinese organizations and individuals be allowed to donate to American colleges, and should their PhD students have access to scientific research grants? It’s not an easy question to answer at all. And judging by the March 12 hearing in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the Chinese may be self censoring, colleges are being more restrictive, and there is a concern mainly among Democrats who spoke during the hearing, that going after Chinese money and Chinese PhD students is bad for schools, and American innovation.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) asked if we should “fully cut off academic or research ties with Chinese institutions and researchers?” It was the single question needed to summarize the day’s hearing.
Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars said it needed to be considered. [Testimony] Wood later told Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) – who spoke about how one in eight residents of his state are foreign born and his state’s income has reason, as if there was a correlation between the two – said doing so would be detrimental to Virginia’s R&D braintrust. Wood’s comeback was perfect.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever raised questions that Indian students coming to the United States pose a security risk. There are many other nations in the world who send their students to study in the United States with no security concerns whatsoever. This is not a matter of checking people off by ethnicity. That's a civil rights violation. We are concerned about people who themselves might be perfectly innocent but come from a nation that puts pressure on their families, that even threatens them with death if they do not cooperate with the state interest. That's a situation that we cannot tolerate as a nation.
Robert Daly, a Senior Fellow from the Asia Society, was the most sanguine of the three people who testified at the hearing. He both recognized the threat, and put it low on the totem pole of items Washington should concern itself with in regard to China competition.
For Daly, government and academia must work in tandem on this subject, and they are. “Suspicion about foreign malign influence on our campuses and especially Chinese influence is both reasonable and necessary to protect our national security and academic integrity,” he said. [Testimony]
Most Chinese money going to universities comes from individuals, some corporations, and non-profit groups. The one group that raised concern, beyond the donor class, were the PhD students and post-doc research fellows.
In some cases, the U.S. government pays Chinese post-doctoral students to do research at American universities. Some of those students have been determined to be affiliated with not only the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but also entities in China that are affiliated with China’s military industrial complex, said Craig Singleton, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. [Testimony]
“As of today, there are no restrictions on funding streams for Chinese scholars at (U.S.) universities working on defense department grants,” he said.
Where Did This Issue Originate?
China and American schools became a topic around 2014. It started with the Confucius Institute, a program that was launched as a soft power program of the Chinese government, funded by the Office of Chinese Language Council International, part of their Ministry of Education but seen by the West as a strategic communications wing of the CCP.
It offered colleges free teachers and textbooks, and paid them to host these institutions that mainly taught Chinese language classes. After pressure by American groups like the National Association of Scholars, China pulled the plug on these institutions.
“There are no more institutions under that name, although I continue to think they are around by the dozens and have only been rebranded,” said Wood.
Daly was part of an advisory team that worked with two separate presidents to help shed light on the Confucius Institutes. He said they “were not hotbeds of Chinese espionage.”
Foreign Funds at American Universities
It is definitely not all that clear who is giving what. The Committee heard some examples, and Senators gave some themselves. Qatar donated $4.7 billion between 2001 and 2021, but most of that was for them to build schools in Qatar.
The data on this comes from a new Department of Education portal on foreign funding; a portal everyone said was well intentioned, but needed work. One limitation is that the portal, like Section 117 of the Higher Education Act on which it is based, does not distinguish between gifts and contracts.
CPA said the data presented so far shows that in many respects we are “serving as a research and development arm of the Chinese” defense industry. The No. 1 recipient of R&D money was Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Of their $1.6 billion received from 2015-2023, China-linked entities and individuals donated $28.9 million.
According to DoE data, China contributed $6.8 billion to American universities over an undisclosed time period, so not much more than the small nation of Qatar. Worse, the DoE’s portal showed universities reported roughly $400 million in transactions involving entities that appear on U.S. government entity lists, including Huawei. Other donations come from tiny countries with little to no known foreign policy interests. One was the British isle of Guernsey, which donated $441 million to Yale.
“No one thinks that Guernsey is an enemy of the United States or an adversary, but it is bizarre that a nation with 67,000 people is able to give a half a billion dollars a year to one of America’s elite universities. Where’s the money really coming from? What is it being spent on?” asked Wood. Nobody knows. Maybe Yale knows. Guernsey, of course, is an offshore tax haven.
There are competing issues here bumping heads. One is restrictions. The other is keeping American universities free and open to global engagement, even with China. The question being posed by the panel is whether or not universities, with help from the U.S. government, can adequately build safeguards that ensure that openness is not exploited by malignant actors. Congress could strengthen transparency requirements governing foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, was one suggestion by the panel.
Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) asked if American universities were on the case?
Daly said they were. “All I see in universities is vigilance. They’ve received the message on this.”
The New Cold War Comes to Campus
Everything that we know about the motives and the methods of the CCP indicates that they will try to exploit the vulnerabilities created by openness and internationalization of our colleges and universities. The U.S.-China strategic rivalry is likely going to last for decades. There is a derisking in supply chains. Now there is talk of doing the same on campus and not all members are sold on this, nor does anyone think there is an easy fix to it. It’s going to be achieved on a case by case basis, with some China self censorship in funding becoming evident.
For Chinese scholars conducting R&D at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, be it CalTech or MIT, the data to date suggests that some 85% of Chinese PhD students end up staying in the United States after graduating. Many become citizens.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) was first to point out in the hearing that we were in a new Cold War.
Daly made it sound like removing China from academia would be like removing them from our supply chains. He wasn’t suggesting we don’t remove China from our supply chains, but he warned against shutting Chinese scientists out, from collaborating with the U.S. Oddly, there was not one mention by anyone about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese R&D shop that worked on National Institutes of Health-related grants and brought SARS-Cov-2 to our doorstep, aka the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not a Chinese scientist in America, but it’s a collaboration.
China has a chokehold on us in critical minerals. They also have a chokehold in medical precursors. No China, no ibuprofen for Americans. They are now widely acknowledged to be the leaders in biopharmaceutical research. It is expected over the next 10 or 20 years that most of the major new therapies, and most of the major new medicines, will be coming out of China because we are no longer keeping pace and we are under-resourcing what had been the world's strongest medical and discovery institutions. They're increasingly innovative and we are not yet falling behind, but the balance is shifting. We have to go on offense and provide research dollars and facilities to match those of China, both to develop our own native talent and to attract the best foreign talent.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
Should Chinese Nationals Be Allowed to Donate to American Colleges, Participate in Research Grants?
Should Chinese organizations and individuals be allowed to donate to American colleges, and should their PhD students have access to scientific research grants? It’s not an easy question to answer at all. And judging by the March 12 hearing in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the Chinese may be self censoring, colleges are being more restrictive, and there is a concern mainly among Democrats who spoke during the hearing, that going after Chinese money and Chinese PhD students is bad for schools, and American innovation.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) asked if we should “fully cut off academic or research ties with Chinese institutions and researchers?” It was the single question needed to summarize the day’s hearing.
Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars said it needed to be considered. [Testimony] Wood later told Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) – who spoke about how one in eight residents of his state are foreign born and his state’s income has reason, as if there was a correlation between the two – said doing so would be detrimental to Virginia’s R&D braintrust. Wood’s comeback was perfect.
Robert Daly, a Senior Fellow from the Asia Society, was the most sanguine of the three people who testified at the hearing. He both recognized the threat, and put it low on the totem pole of items Washington should concern itself with in regard to China competition.
For Daly, government and academia must work in tandem on this subject, and they are. “Suspicion about foreign malign influence on our campuses and especially Chinese influence is both reasonable and necessary to protect our national security and academic integrity,” he said. [Testimony]
Most Chinese money going to universities comes from individuals, some corporations, and non-profit groups. The one group that raised concern, beyond the donor class, were the PhD students and post-doc research fellows.
In some cases, the U.S. government pays Chinese post-doctoral students to do research at American universities. Some of those students have been determined to be affiliated with not only the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but also entities in China that are affiliated with China’s military industrial complex, said Craig Singleton, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. [Testimony]
“As of today, there are no restrictions on funding streams for Chinese scholars at (U.S.) universities working on defense department grants,” he said.
Where Did This Issue Originate?
China and American schools became a topic around 2014. It started with the Confucius Institute, a program that was launched as a soft power program of the Chinese government, funded by the Office of Chinese Language Council International, part of their Ministry of Education but seen by the West as a strategic communications wing of the CCP.
It offered colleges free teachers and textbooks, and paid them to host these institutions that mainly taught Chinese language classes. After pressure by American groups like the National Association of Scholars, China pulled the plug on these institutions.
“There are no more institutions under that name, although I continue to think they are around by the dozens and have only been rebranded,” said Wood.
Daly was part of an advisory team that worked with two separate presidents to help shed light on the Confucius Institutes. He said they “were not hotbeds of Chinese espionage.”
Foreign Funds at American Universities
It is definitely not all that clear who is giving what. The Committee heard some examples, and Senators gave some themselves. Qatar donated $4.7 billion between 2001 and 2021, but most of that was for them to build schools in Qatar.
The data on this comes from a new Department of Education portal on foreign funding; a portal everyone said was well intentioned, but needed work. One limitation is that the portal, like Section 117 of the Higher Education Act on which it is based, does not distinguish between gifts and contracts.
CPA said the data presented so far shows that in many respects we are “serving as a research and development arm of the Chinese” defense industry. The No. 1 recipient of R&D money was Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Of their $1.6 billion received from 2015-2023, China-linked entities and individuals donated $28.9 million.
According to DoE data, China contributed $6.8 billion to American universities over an undisclosed time period, so not much more than the small nation of Qatar. Worse, the DoE’s portal showed universities reported roughly $400 million in transactions involving entities that appear on U.S. government entity lists, including Huawei. Other donations come from tiny countries with little to no known foreign policy interests. One was the British isle of Guernsey, which donated $441 million to Yale.
“No one thinks that Guernsey is an enemy of the United States or an adversary, but it is bizarre that a nation with 67,000 people is able to give a half a billion dollars a year to one of America’s elite universities. Where’s the money really coming from? What is it being spent on?” asked Wood. Nobody knows. Maybe Yale knows. Guernsey, of course, is an offshore tax haven.
There are competing issues here bumping heads. One is restrictions. The other is keeping American universities free and open to global engagement, even with China. The question being posed by the panel is whether or not universities, with help from the U.S. government, can adequately build safeguards that ensure that openness is not exploited by malignant actors. Congress could strengthen transparency requirements governing foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, was one suggestion by the panel.
Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) asked if American universities were on the case?
Daly said they were. “All I see in universities is vigilance. They’ve received the message on this.”
The New Cold War Comes to Campus
Everything that we know about the motives and the methods of the CCP indicates that they will try to exploit the vulnerabilities created by openness and internationalization of our colleges and universities. The U.S.-China strategic rivalry is likely going to last for decades. There is a derisking in supply chains. Now there is talk of doing the same on campus and not all members are sold on this, nor does anyone think there is an easy fix to it. It’s going to be achieved on a case by case basis, with some China self censorship in funding becoming evident.
For Chinese scholars conducting R&D at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, be it CalTech or MIT, the data to date suggests that some 85% of Chinese PhD students end up staying in the United States after graduating. Many become citizens.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) was first to point out in the hearing that we were in a new Cold War.
Daly made it sound like removing China from academia would be like removing them from our supply chains. He wasn’t suggesting we don’t remove China from our supply chains, but he warned against shutting Chinese scientists out, from collaborating with the U.S. Oddly, there was not one mention by anyone about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese R&D shop that worked on National Institutes of Health-related grants and brought SARS-Cov-2 to our doorstep, aka the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not a Chinese scientist in America, but it’s a collaboration.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
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