China is relying on its links with scores of US universities to collect sensitive information that helps the nuclear and cyber-espionage programs of its military-industrial complex, according to reports.
The startling revelation was made in December by an American think tank, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) that the information so gleaned is being used to upgrade China's military modernization and achieve "Chinese military dominance", according to International Forum for Rights and Security.
Further, the report, titled 'The Middle Kingdom Meets Higher Education: How US Universities Support China's Military-Industrial Complex', "identifies 28 American universities and schools in 19 states that maintain academic and research partnerships with Chinese institutions that power Beijing's defense establishment."
Meanwhile, Adjunct Fellow at FDD who authored the report, Craig Singleton, said: "The Chinese government managed to build an intricate web of academic and research partnerships between America's top universities and Chinese schools that directly enable China's military-industrial complex."
Earlier, the Chinese institutes that enter into agreements with American universities were called Confucius Institutes (Cis). They are Chinese government-sponsored organizations offering Chinese-language, cultural, and historical programming at the primary, secondary, and university levels worldwide.
Also, the FDD report said: "CIs are also a key element in China's 'united front', a network of groups and key individuals that seek to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."
According to the report's author, "CIs further serve as platforms that advance facets of China's military-civil fusion (MCF), a national strategy aimed at acquiring the world's cutting-edge technologies -- including through theft -- to achieve Chinese military dominance". China's CI-enabled initiatives include the "establishment of academic and research partnerships between top-tier American institutions and Chinese universities supporting Beijing's military-industrial complex".
The report said that CI closures began in "earnest only after Congress passed legislation that bars universities hosting CIs from receiving certain types of funding from the US Department of Defense". The universities that have resisted shuttering their CIs are ones that do not receive federal funding jeopardized by this new legislation.
The American universities with agreements with the CIs include top research universities of the US including Stanford, Tufts, and Texas A&M, include the University of Washington, Arizona State University, the University of Utah, Rutgers University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the College of William and Mary, and Emory University.
( With inputs from ANI )
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