A new Republican-led House report revealed that hundreds of millions of research dollars from the United States might have inadvertently helped China with its military technology over the past decade.
The House Select Committee on China Competition, and the Education and Workforce Committee, discovered that 9,000 joint research publications in the U.S. were co-authored by people with ties to China’s "defense and security apparatus," per Fox News.
Those papers were funded through either the Department of Defense (DOD) or the Intelligence Community (IC),
The research projects could allegedly be weaponized by China in the event of a war between the two global superpowers, and includes research on topics like hypersonics, nuclear and high energy physics, and artificial intelligence.
"The purpose of that research funding is to generate advancements that will eventually become applied warfighting and intelligence capabilities to protect America against adversarial nations," according to a summary of the report. "Yet the research that the DOD and the IC are funding is providing back-door access to the very foreign adversary nation whose aggression these capabilities are necessary to protect against."
The House report also claims that there have already been instances where Chinese researchers in the U.S. would take the information back home and use it to "achieve advancements in fourth-generation nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, graphene semiconductors, and robotics."
The report recommends stricter guidelines regarding federally funded research, and the passage of the Deterrent Act, which would expand government oversight and reporting requirements for foreign institutes in education. The bill passed the House last year but has not been voted on by the Senate.
"This investigation just further proved why it’s necessary," House Education and Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx said in a statement. "Our research universities have a responsibility to avoid any complicity in [China's] atrocious human rights abuses or attempts to undermine our national security."
