The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has sent letters to seven universities pushing them to cease facilitating a scholarship for Chinese graduate students.
The China Scholarship Council mandates that participating students return to China for two years after studying in the United States, which causes the committee to label it a “nefarious mechanism” for the Chinese Communist Party.
The scholarship council is directly run by the Chinese government.
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The committee sent the letters to the University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, Temple University, the University of Tennessee, the University of California (UC) at Davis, UC Irvine, and UC Riverside on July 8.
The letters say that China is using the scholarships to steal American technology, and urge the schools to end their relationship with the program.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is developing and acquiring key technologies through both legal and illegal means, including investments in private industries, talent recruitment programs, directing academic and research relationships and collaboration for its military gain, forced technology transfer, intelligence gathering, and outright theft,” the message says.
“One of the nefarious mechanisms that the CCP relies on is the China Scholarship Council (CSC). CSC purports to be a joint scholarship program between U.S. and Chinese institutions,” it continues. “[H]owever, in reality it is a CCP-managed technology transfer effort that exploits U.S. institutions and directly supports China’s military and scientific growth.”
According to the letters, one requirement for sponsored students in the program is “to submit a report to [People’s Republic of China] embassies or consulates every three months, detailing their academic progress, laboratory work, research outputs, and publications.”
Under President Trump, the federal government has grown increasingly concerned about the relationship between China and American colleges and universities.
The Department of Education has announced two investigations in the last several months into the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley over donations from China and other foreign countries that the schools did not disclose.
In May, a spokesperson for the State Department stated that the Trump administration “will not tolerate the CCP’s exploitation of U.S. universities or theft of U.S. research, intellectual property, or technologies.”
Campus Reform contacted each university that received a letter from the committee for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
Brendan McDonald is a graduate student pursuing a Master of Theological Studies. He graduated from Thomas More College and is interested in writing and communication.