Category: China, Foreign Influence, Higher Education;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
The term “telling tales out of school” emerged during the English Renaissance to condemn sharing privileged information; yet it uncomfortably applies to today’s higher education system and national security. Last fall, as Harvard fumbled in covering its tolerance for anti-Semitism and plagiarism, China’s Tianjin University (TJU) also made the news. Tianjin’s research in the development of 6G telecommunications technology was noted as instrumental in The Eurasian Times’ November coverage of a wargame in which Chinese hypersonic missiles successfully shot down U.S. B-21 stealth bombers.
TJU plays a key role in building China’s “civil-miliary fusion,” such as building dual-use technologies relevant to weapons development. It is overseen by China’s State Administration for Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) and conducts research for China’s Ministry of State Security. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice charged three TJU professors with economic espionage targeting radio frequency technology.
The U.S. government is seemingly well aware of TJU’s malign activities that are detrimental to American national security, as the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) flagged the university over its economic espionage in 2020. Just last March, the BIS expanded its Export Administration Rules (EAR) to cover more than 13 entities and aliases of TJU because of noted risks to national security. As of 2015, TJU listed U.S. partners that included NASA, Harvard University, Caltech, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, MIT, Princeton, the University of Arizona, the Carnegie Institute of Science, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, UT Austin, and additional universities in U.S.-aligned countries.
As the race for nuclear missiles shaped the Cold War, a twenty-first century Sino-American semiconductor race serves as one of the features of great power conflict for supremacy in the Pacific. TJU is part of this race, along with some of its U.S. partners. Just recently, a team of researchers from TJU and Georgia Tech created a new semiconductor out of graphene that can outperform silicon.
The relationship between TJU and Georgia Tech dates at least to 2016, when then Georgia Tech president G.P. Peterson announced the collaboration between the two universities as part of a “focus on internationalization” that would include cooperation in the majors of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, environmental engineering, and more. In 2020, China’s Ministry of Education “approved the establishment of the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute (GTSI), Tianjin University as a Sino-Foreign Cooperative Education Institute between Georgia Tech and Tianjin University.” The agreement is renewable until 2036. Seemingly unconcerned over TJU’s ties to Beijing’s civil-military fusion initiatives, Georgia Tech worked with TJU’s International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems on its graphene research.
Graphene is a big deal beyond its purely commercial uses. In 2018, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted how an estimated 2,500 soldiers from China go abroad to Western universities and companies to procure sensitive research and repatriate it for Beijing’s military. Graphene is but one of multiple targets for procurement. China’s military has dubbed such efforts as “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China.” A year later, the European Defense Agency noted that graphene’s military applications pertain to drone technology, “ballistic protection materials,” supercapacitor electrode technology, and nuclear capabilities. Georgia Tech helped create a graphene semiconductor, but may have helped create a military catastrophe along with it.
Until next time.
P.S. This Thursday, January 18, at 3 pm ET, we will be hosting a webinar event with Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese dissident and education advocate. Register here for "Mao's America: A Discussion with Xi Van Fleet," we hope to see you there!
Ian Oxnevad
Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies
National Association of Scholars
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