Exclusive: US universities failed to disclose tens of millions in Chinese funding

American universities are failing to disclose millions of dollars in funding from China, a report released Wednesday found.

The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has received $87.5 million from China since 2013 and another $59.4 million from Hong Kong, while the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) accepted at least $32.3 million within the same time frame, according to a new report from OpenTheBooks. However, both universities demonstrated “significant failures in the reporting of foreign funding,” according to a 2024 House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party investigation, which also predicted there to be “likely hundreds of millions, if not billions in total” of Chinese dollars flowing into American universities that are not reported.

Both universities held a partnership with the Chinese Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), a program through Tsinghua University that has campuses in Shenzhen, China, and near both U.S. universities, OpenTheBooks found. The committee also discovered that the program and others were used to “serve as conduits for transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to China, including to entities linked to China’s defense machine and the security apparatus it uses to facilitate human rights abuses.” The two universities quickly began the process of severing ties with the Chinese counterpart around the time of the committee’s investigation, according to the report.

Programs such as these are administered through China’s national defense agency, the State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, with an explicit goal of “strengthening military forces with additional personnel and more advanced equipment,” the report stated.

The funding into Georgia Tech went unreported for eight years, OpenTheBooks found, with the university claiming the details were “unintentionally omitted.” Under the first Trump Administration, the Committee discovered $6.5 billion in unreported funding from several universities received “from countries that pose serious national security threats,” the report details.

Several other schools, such as The Ohio State University and the University of Texas, have also accepted millions in foreign funds, the majority of which come from China.

UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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