WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - National Security Matters: How the CCP Steals American Military Research

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

On this week's episode of National Security Matters, Malia Thibado talks the underreported issue of the how some American research partnerships directly feed information to the Chinese military. 

Hello and welcome to National Security Matters, the show where we discuss anything and everything related to U.S. international relations and defense policy. I'm your host, Malia Tibido. Today, our topic is foreign interference in American universities, with a focus on how the Chinese Communist Party takes advantage of its research partnerships with U.S. universities. China makes no secret of its military civil fusion policy, which has the goal to remove all barriers between a private, scholarship and national defense in order to obviously bring the newest technology to the CCP's People's Liberation Army. A highlight of this policy is how much control the CCP has over China's universities. Every school has a party committee office that reports to the government whether the Institute is following the general CCP directives. So there's no Chinese university that is completely exempt from the military civil fusion. The U.S. in response has blacklisted many Chinese

universities and research institutes because of this, but recent reports show that lack of Department of Defense monitoring has led to a lot of partnerships that have directly benefited the PLA. There's even evidence of Americans working with the seven sons of national defense, which is a group of seven universities that are directly under the CCP's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. But this indirect espionage doesn't just take place on Chinese soil. It's also on American universities. Over the last decade, American and Chinese universities have released over 9,000 joint research publications, many of them focused on dual-use technology.

This is anything that can be used in both a civilian and or military capacity. For example, you can use AI to program self-driving cars, but that same technology can also be used in autonomous attack drones. In the case of this research, the partnered universities worked on government-funded, meaning taxpayer-funded, projects like target tracking technology and drone operations network nuclear and high energy physics, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, and hypersonic weapons. And this is crazy. The CCP credits the U.S. Navy and Boeing company for how it got some of its essential lightweight technology and one of its high explosive breakthroughs that it used

for its weapons. China is now the global leader of hypersonic weapons. In fact, Xi Jinping has not been shy about showing off, especially during. his country's latest victory over Japan Day parade a few days ago. The U.S. by contrast, has a long history of defunding its hypersonic programs and has only begun testing its own version this past year. A new report shows that between June of 2023 to June of 2025, 50% of the Department of Defense-funded University projects were co-authored by individuals or universities associated with Chinese defense industrial base. In many, Congress passed the defending education transparency and ending rogue regimes engaging in nefarious

transactions act. This act prohibits university contracts with quote countries of concern, which would be China, without a waiver. It requires a disclosure of contracts between researchers or university employees with countries of concern. And it has a requirement for a disclosure of foreign gifts to all institutes of higher education. Hopefully this will have some lasting good effect, but I'm not sure. In this episode, I did not go into the direct espionage. The CCP conducts on American campuses, but no, it exists. And spies have been caught trying to sneak out biological samples, chemical research, and espionage-related recruitment. targets. On that cheerful note, this has been Malia Tibido with National Security Matters on

WRFH, Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.