The US must protect vital information from enemies like China

In his 1940 book, “Why England Slept,” John F. Kennedy examined England’s failure during the 1930s to respond effectively to the emerging threat from Nazi Germany. Like England, the U.S. today keeps hitting the snooze button instead of facing the challenge from China now on our doorstep.

A small sampling of China’s recent activities exposes its hostile intentions.

Just two months ago, in what the U.S. Treasury Department called a “major incident,” Chinese state-sponsored actors hacked into employee workstations and accessed important records, including highly sensitive records in Treasury’s Foreign Assets Control office.

Other large-scale cyberattacks by China on our water, energy and telecommunications infrastructure reveal what intelligence officials describe as “pre-positioning,” so that China can disrupt the U.S. ability to respond in the event of a conflict.

China’s acquisition of farmland near critical U.S. military installations could also be used to monitor and disrupt U.S. military communications responding to Chinese aggression.

Without China’s financial and material backing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have faltered long ago.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently declared that China is now “on a dangerous course,” with its military forces continuously rehearsing for the “forced unification” of Taiwan.

Our government’s sometimes inept response should frighten the American people, particularly since China’s growing threat has been materially aided through the shocking misuse of taxpayer dollars.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and House Committee on Education and the Workforce recently divulged that the Department of Defense had funded more than 2,000 scientific research papers with Chinese collaborators directly affiliated with China’s defense and industrial base. The collaborations involved “emerging technologies” related to hypersonic and fourth-generation nuclear weapons, AI, advanced lasers, high-performance explosives, rocket fuels and robotics.

Appallingly, the Defense Department funded scientific collaborations that are building and improving China’s weapons now pointed at the U.S. and our allies.

Xi Jinping must be astonished at America’s sheer recklessness.

In its quest for military superiority, China’s leadership has also long recognized the “soft target” of research developed at our research universities, where it gains access through its foreign talent acquisition programs and financial ties to our universities.

Much of America’s military and civilian research innovation is developed at our research universities, with around $59 billion in annual support from the taxpayers. Thanks to China’s extensive financial and scientific collaborations with our major universities, Chinese researchers controlled by the Chinese Communist Party often have a seat at America’s taxpayer-funded research table. Under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military-Civil Fusion Development Committee, China then applies research innovations harvested from America to build the People’s Liberation Army’s emerging weapons and surveillance systems.

The House Select Committee’s report included six case studies of our research universities serving as “conduits for transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to China.” Recent Department of Justice settlement agreements with Stanford University, the University of Maryland and the Cleveland Clinic illustrate how universities fail to disclose foreign ties in violation of federal laws. Harvard’s former chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Charles Lieber, failed to disclose the $50,000 monthly fee paid to him by China, along with $1.5 million to set up a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology — despite receiving more than $15 million in grants from the Defense Department and National Institutes of Health.

An October 2020 Department of Education report revealed widespread foreign funding disclosure failures by America’s universities and colleges involving China, Russia and other countries. Noting that prominent universities had failed to disclose billions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts, the Education Department determined that “institutional decision-making [by universities] is generally divorced from any sense of obligation to our taxpayers or concern for ... American national interests, security, or values.”

In response, a House bipartisan majority in December 2023 passed the “DETERRENT Act,” which would have imposed far more stringent foreign funding disclosure requirements for universities, particularly for funding from countries of concern such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. But DETERRENT died in the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer failed to support its passage.

DETERRENT was just reintroduced in the House, where it’s likely to pass again with bipartisan support. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, passage appears likely there, too, with the bill eventually making its way to the Oval Office for President Trump’s signature.

Congress should prioritize passage of the DETERRENT Act. If it becomes law, it will force more stringent, detailed foreign funding disclosures by our research universities. Failure to comply with the new disclosure requirements will result in steep penalties, including loss of all federal funding.

China is at war with the U.S. and our Indo-Pacific allies. We see it in China’s massive military buildup, its open belligerence to us and our allies, its theft of our intellectual property and research innovations, its cyberwarfare against us, and its pre-positioning of capabilities to sabotage our critical infrastructure if a conflict occurs.

DETERRENT will provide a critical tool, imperative to America’s national security interests, for timely disclosures of China’s ties with our research universities now directly benefiting China’s threat to the U.S.

China has long received a remarkable return on its extensive financial ties with our research universities. If DETERRENT becomes law, it will result in the exposure of truly dangerous foreign financial ties and give the American people and policymakers an opportunity for course correction — hopefully before we’re in a hot war with China.

Paul R. Moore served as chief investigative counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, where he led investigations of China’s undisclosed foreign funding in higher education. He previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and is now a senior fellow in the Economic and Financial Statecraft Program at the Prague Security Studies Institute.

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