美国众议院一个关注来自中国的威胁委员会发布了一份报告，指出美国联邦研究经费促进了具有军事应用潜力的中国技术的进步，这可能壮大了与中国相匹敌的国家安全对手。
这份由美众议院“中国共产党选择委员会”和“教育与劳动力委员会”的共和党议员小组发布的报告认为，在hypersonic武器、核武器、人工智能以及高端半导体等领域的创新，部分归功于中美研究机构之间的合作。该报告警告称，这些技术发展可能在未来影响两国在战场上的表现。
该报告指出，由美国资助的研究人员与中国高校的联合项目以及中美的大学合办研究所对北京的科技进步有推动力。其中包括加州大学伯克利分校与某所中国高校和乔治亚理工学院合办的一些研究机构。
加州大学伯克利分校和乔治亚理工学院都针对报告中的多项发现提出异议，并对此进行了反驳。但伯克利在周五的一份声明中表示，由于缺乏对该校合作机构内部研究成果的了解深度，其决定终止对一家与中国合作的研究所的所有权。
同样地，乔治亚理工学院宣布本月将停止参与其合办的研究所，终止在中国的合作学位项目，原因是被列为美国贸易限制清单上的中国合作伙伴使该合作变得“不可持续”。
中美之间的紧张关系使得双方曾鼓励并认可的各种学术和商业联系都受到了质疑。
尽管美国仍在全球科技领域中占据领先地位，但中国的科研能力在材料科学、hypersonics、纳米技术等领域突飞猛进。中国政府声称其科技成果旨在支撑军备建设，服务于军事目的。
如果该报告的建议被采纳，将极大限制世界两大经济体之间的科学研究合作。
目前，关于与美国和其它敌对国家的合作存在清晰界限：一方面是对基础科研的支持，该领域寻求跨多个学科深化基本科学理解，不受管制；另一方面则是应用研究，旨在运用这些知识开发具体技术与应用，并受到一定安全限制。
众议院的报告强调，在军事与商业兼备的应用技术领域中，即使是基础研究的合作也可能导致中国重大突破，对美国国家安全构成威胁。报告分析了10年间超过9,000篇得到了美国国防部或情报机构经费支持的研究论文，其中与中国研究机构和人员有合作。这些合作文件的2千多份直接与军事研究和工业基地关联。
该报告指出绝大多数文献涉及军民两用技术，对于商业领域具有价值。部分研究主题具有直接军事应用，如高性能炸药、火箭燃料、水下目标追踪以及无人机协同操作等。
报告提出了六个实例，在这些案例中，接受美国联邦资金的研究人员帮助中国在核武器技术和人工智能、先进激光、半导体与机器人技术等领域取得了进展。
该报告显示，国防部资助的科研旨在保持美国军事优势，“很可能是用于助长并强化了”中国的军力。
同时，报告考察了中美三方合作研究机构的情况，尤其是乔治亚理工学院和伯克利分校在中国的研究所项目。报告主张这些合办机构是专业知识、应用研究与技术转移渠道，而美国大学在上报来自中国资助方面有所疏漏。
来自密歇根州的众议员约翰·莫伦纳尔称该调查结果“令人担忧”。他赞扬了乔治亚理工学院关闭与中国研究院的做法，并呼吁其他高校仿效。他还表示，必须禁止与被列为黑名单实体的合作、加强新兴技术研究的安全框架以及通过立法来对美国大学的责任进行明确。
负责通信的乔治亚理工学院副董事长艾比盖尔·特米说，该校在深圳的研究项目“聚焦于教育而非科研”，在合作期间并未进行研究工作。她提到校方已就天大被列入实体名单后几个月开始对其进行了内部审查，并且发现了没有安全问题但增加了额外的保护措施。
然而，在美国考虑阻止与实体清单中企业有关联的合作机构获取联邦资助之际，乔治亚理工决定结束该合作关系。她说：“局势已经表明我们需要调整。”
伯克利副校长、科研主管凯瑟琳·叶基克表示，伯克利的研究人员仅从事那些成果能够在全球公开传播的科研项目，并且不认为其在清华大学-伯克利深圳研究所进行的任何研究有其他目的。
她补充说，在考虑过几个月后，校方决定放弃对一家拥有中国研究所所有权的非营利机构的所有权。她表示学校不断评估和应对对外合作带来的风险与收益，并对国会关于科研安全的问题非常重视。
除了终止与中国清华大学的合作关系，伯克利还在审查学生、研究人员交换项目以及受资助研究计划等方面的其他方面。
该报告建议限制联邦资助研究者的活动，这可能会遏制美国-中国之间的科学合作。目前，在华的美国学者和留学生人数较少，但中国公民在美国实验室工作占据了重要份额，2020年美国授予科学与工程博士学位中有17%是由来自中国的留学生的获得者。
该报告指责拜登政府对外国捐赠与合同申报要求执行不力，并呼吁强化监管并严格执行。同时，它推动禁止联邦资助研究人员与中国军事关联的人和机构的合作。这些限制措施的影响可能非常显著，因为许多中国大型企业和大学或多或少都涉及军事工业领域。
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：U.S. Research Aided Chinese Military Technology, House Republicans Say
新闻日期：2024-09-23
原文摘要：
A House committee focused on threats from China argued in a report released on Monday that U.S. federal research funding had helped to advance Chinese technologies with military applications, helping to fuel a potential national security rival to the United States. The report argues that Chinese partnerships with U.S.-funded researchers and joint collaborations between Chinese and American universities have helped to propel Beijing’s advancements in fields like hypersonic and nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. The report concludes that these developments may one day influence how the two nations perform on the battlefield. The report — put out by the Republican members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce — also recommends stricter guidelines around federally funded research, including significantly curtailing the ability of researchers who receive U.S. grants to work with Chinese universities and companies that have military ties. Part of the report focuses on several joint China-based institutes between Chinese and American universities, including one by the University of California, Berkeley, and another with the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both Berkeley and Georgia Tech disputed many of the report’s findings. But in a statement to The New York Times on Friday, Berkeley said it had decided to terminate its ownership in the Chinese institute, in part because of its lack of visibility into research being conducted there by affiliates of other institutions. Georgia Tech also announced this month that it would discontinue its participation in its joint institute and work to end its degree programs in China, saying the inclusion of its Chinese partner on a restricted U.S. trade list had made the cooperation “untenable.” Growing tensions between the United States and China have called into question many kinds of academic and commercial relationships that were formerly encouraged by both countries. The United States remains a global leader in science and technology, but China’s capacity has leaped ahead in certain areas like materials science, hypersonics and nanotechnology. The Chinese government has said its scientific advancements serve an important purpose in helping it build its military. If the report’s recommendations are adopted, it could significantly curtail the number of scientific collaborations between the world’s largest economies. U.S. rules on such cooperation with China and other adversarial countries now draw a bright line between fundamental research, which seeks to advance basic scientific understanding in an array of fields and remains unregulated, and applied research, which uses that knowledge to develop specific technologies and applications and faces certain security restrictions. The House committee report argues that for technologies that may have military and commercial applications, even fundamental research collaborations have led to significant Chinese breakthroughs that could harm U.S. national security. The report identifies nearly 9,000 research publications released over the past decade that were supported by funding from the Defense Department or the U.S. intelligence community, and included co-authors affiliated with institutions in China. More than 2,000 of those included co-authors directly affiliated with the Chinese military research and industrial base, the report said. The vast majority of those papers pertained to so-called dual-use technologies valuable to both the military and the commercial sector, the report said. Some of the subjects had direct military applications, like high performance explosives and rocket fuels, tracking of underwater targets and coordinated drone operation. The report gave six case studies in which researchers who received U.S. federal funding helped to advance China’s nuclear weapons technology or its capabilities in artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, semiconductors and robotics. “The troubling conclusion then is that Defense Department-funded research — intended to allow the U.S. military to maintain a technological edge over its adversaries — has likely been used to enable and strengthen” the Chinese military, the report said. The report also looked at three joint U.S.-China academic institutions, including the programs run by Georgia Tech and Berkeley. It argued that these joint institutes served as channels to transfer expertise, applied research and technologies to China, and that the U.S. universities had made lapses in reporting Chinese funding sources to the federal government. Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the China committee, said in a statement that the results of the investigation were “alarming.” “The Chinese Communist Party is driving its military advancements through U.S. taxpayer funded research and through joint U.S.-P.R.C. institutes in China,” he said, using the abbreviation for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China. He commended Georgia Tech for shutting down its Chinese institute and said other universities should follow. “We also must ban research collaboration with blacklisted entities, enact stricter guardrails on emerging technology research, and hold American universities accountable” by passing new legislation, he said. Abbigail Tumpey, the vice president of communications at Georgia Tech, said the work at the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, or G.T.S.I., “was focused on educating students, not on research.” “As Georgia Tech has told the committee for months, there was no research conducted at G.T.S.I., no facilitation of technology transfer and no federal funding provided to China, and the report provides no facts to support its unsubstantiated claims on these fronts,” she said. Ms. Tumpey said on Friday that Georgia Tech carried out its own review into the cooperation shortly after its Chinese partner, Tianjin University, was added to the entity list in 2020 because it was accused of stealing U.S. trade secrets. Georgia Tech found no security concerns, but implemented additional safeguards, she said. However, after watching as Congress considered new restrictions that would block U.S. institutions that had partnerships with firms on the entity list from access to federal funding, the university decided to end its partnership. “The writing was on the wall for us that this entire landscape has changed,” she said. Katherine Yelick, the vice chancellor for research at Berkeley, said that its researchers engaged “only in research whose results are always openly disseminated around the world,” and that it was not aware of any research by Berkeley faculty at the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute for any other purpose. She said Berkeley had decided to relinquish its ownership in a nonprofit that owns the Chinese institute after “careful consideration beginning several months ago.” “The university continuously re-evaluates and responds to the risks and benefits posed by foreign engagement and takes concerns about research security very seriously — including those concerns voiced by Congress,” she said. Berkeley said it was also reviewing other aspects of its collaboration with Tsinghua University, like student and researcher exchanges and sponsored research projects. The measures the report advocated include restrictions on the activities of federally funded researchers that would chill U.S.-China scientific collaboration. While the number of U.S. academics and students in China is more limited, Chinese nationals make up a significant proportion of the work force in American laboratories, and in 2020, 17 percent of the doctoral degrees in science and engineering awarded in the United States went to students from China. The report accused the Biden administration of lax enforcement of foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements, and called for stronger oversight and enforcement. It also pushed for new prohibitions on cooperation between federally funded researchers and people and organizations affiliated with the Chinese military. The effects of such restrictions could be significant, since many major Chinese companies and universities have some exposure to the country’s military industry.
