A group of Republican lawmakers is pushing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on federal funds flowing to U.S. universities with ties to Beijing.
“We have learned that DoD [Department of Defense] has awarded funding with contractual periods extending beyond October 1, 2023, to some universities, including a number of major state universities,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that all these institutions are currently carrying a program or institute “directly or indirectly funded, or materially supported” by the communist regime of China.
The timeline mentioned refers to a law that will go into effect in 14 months, restricting grants to any U.S. academic institutions hosting Beijing-funded programs.
The lawmakers noted the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive bill that funds the military, which banned federal grants to any academic institution that hosts a Confucius Institute and “pressured most American universities to close Confucius Institutes on their campuses.”
“The single most common reason universities give when they close a Confucius Institute is that they are replacing it with a new PRC partnership program,” the Republicans said in the letter.
The lawmakers noted that, when the 2021 NDAA was introduced into Congress, CI’s parent agency under the Chinese regime, known as Hanban, was promptly rebranded in July 2020 as the Center for Language Exchange and Cooperation. The letter urged the DoD to focus its efforts on the “restructured programs and institutes” that function similarly to CIs.
According to the NAS report, universities that hosted replacement programs still received federal funds, including the University of Michigan, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, North Carolina State University, Stony Brook University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The lawmakers provided Austin a list of questions over the rebranded CIs and funds, setting a deadline of Aug. 15.
Several Chinese universities have already been recognized by the U.S. government as posing a national security risk to the United States and have been placed on the Commerce Department’s “entity list.”
Although no laws require American universities to sever ties with Chinese institutions that appear on a U.S. blacklist, inclusion on the entity list would require U.S. universities to seek permission from the Commerce Department for certain research collaborations.