Nearly $1 billion dollars in American federal research funds flowed into projects involving Chinese regime defense laboratories posing critical risks to national security, the Epoch Times reports.
The report, released by the Center for Research Security and Integrity on February 19, identifies nearly 1,800 research papers published between January 2019 and July 2025 involving U.S. collaborations with Chinese defense laboratories.
About one third of the articles specifically credited U.S. federal funding for the research. Topics ranged from directed energy systems and energetic materials to radar and sensing, artificial intelligence, flexible electronics and high performance computational physics.
“These are critical technology fields that can fundamentally change future military and warfighting capabilities, yet PRC defense laboratories are directly benefiting from this research,” analysts wrote, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
The report estimates the total value of these research projects at approximately $943.5 million, noting the figure could be much higher due to ambiguities in certain research grants and facility contracts.
Jeffrey Stoff, founder of the Virginia based nonprofit CRSI and report co-author, said the U.S. government and academia “lack the will, resources, or priorities” to effectively safeguard research and innovation.
“This is largely because there are very few regulations that restrict such collaborations. In other words, research-performing organizations, including government laboratories, are not concerned with protecting national interests, even when the research is funded by taxpayers,” Stoff told The Epoch Times via email.
The report followed multiple congressional investigations into projects involving Pentagon or Department of Energy funded researchers collaborating with Chinese institutions advancing China’s military.
The study identifies 45 Chinese laboratories, acknowledged by Beijing as key state level defense laboratories, that collaborated with U.S. entities. Almost all removed terms like “defense” or “national defense” from their official English titles, potentially complicating American institutions’ due diligence and risk assessment efforts.
Among the most active collaborators is the State Key Laboratory of Powder Metallurgy at Central South University in Changsha. Over five years, its personnel co-authored 285 articles with American researchers from public and private universities and federal laboratories. Of these publications, 80 credited U.S. government funding.
Even though the metallurgy lab omits “defense” from its official Chinese name, its core mission supports the Chinese armed forces, particularly in defense aerospace.
About 70 U.S. institutions published research papers with the Chinese metallurgy laboratory since 2019, with the University of Tennessee being the most frequent partner.
The National Science Foundation stands out as the largest sponsor of US institutions partnering with these Chinese laboratories, accounting for more than 71 percent of federal funds identified. Other federal funders include the Pentagon and Department of Energy.
The report found 10 federally funded research centers affiliated with DOE had researchers working with Chinese defense laboratories.
“US institutions and federal research facilities’ critical-risk collaborations with entities supporting China’s defense [research and development] are significant and continue unabated,” the report states. “This raises a fundamental question: if collaborating with PRC defense laboratories is not considered an unacceptable risk that should be restricted, then what is?”
Emil Michael, under secretary of war for research and engineering, told The Epoch Times the Pentagon is “intensifying its efforts to safeguard taxpayer-funded research and is upholding the integrity of America’s scientific community.”
America must implement comprehensive immigration restrictions and declare a moratorium on entry from adversarial nations to prevent expansionist powers like China from embedding intelligence operatives, researchers and agents throughout American institutions. Immigration restriction, not direct military confrontation with China, represents the most effective strategy for stopping these dangerous collaborations that transfer critical defense technologies to hostile foreign powers. Securing our borders and strictly limiting who enters the United States constitutes the first line of defense against espionage operations that exploit America’s openness to systematically steal research, technology and innovation funded by taxpayers and use it to build weapons systems aimed at American servicemembers.
