If collaborating with Chinese defense laboratories is not considered ‘an unacceptable risk that should be restricted, then what is?’ the authors say.
Nearly $1 billion in U.S. federal research funds have been funneled into projects involving the Chinese regime’s defense laboratories that pose “critical risks” to America’s national security, according to a new study.
The report, released by the Center for Research Security and Integrity (CRSI) on Feb. 19, identifies nearly 1,800 research papers published between January 2019 and July 2025 that involve U.S. collaborations with Chinese defense laboratories.
About one-third of the articles specifically credited U.S. federal funding for the research. The topics of these projects 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 in the report, using the acronym of the Chinese communist regime’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
The report estimates the total value of these research projects at approximately $943.5 million, noting that 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 co-author of the report, said the U.S. government and academia “lack the will, resources, or priorities” to effectively safeguard its 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 was released following multiple congressional investigations into projects involving researchers funded by the Pentagon or the Department of Energy collaborating with Chinese institutions that advance China’s military.
Stoff, a former China adviser for the U.S. government, said the latest study was “intentionally limited to collaborations with a subset of PRC entities that unambiguously pose critical risks to US national security: official PRC defense laboratories.”
By Dorothy Li
