The News
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has been secretly funding research at US universities to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in competition awards, according to a Bloomberg investigation.
The Chinese firm single-handedly funded one of Optica’s prizes that granted 10 researchers $100,000 each to spend on research each year in optical communications, biomedical diagnostics, and lasers, Bloomberg reported. Although US institutions and companies are prohibited from sharing technology with Huawei — a rule imposed under the Trump administration and continued under Biden — those restrictions may not apply to the grants as the rules don’t bar Huawei from funding science destined for academic publication, one attorney said.
Research security specialists said the apparent lack of transparency in funding for the grant “violates the spirit of university and US funding-agency policies requiring researchers to disclose whether they’re receiving foreign money.”
The development underscores the tension between Chinese companies like Huawei and its US counterparts in developing new technology that could have military implications.
SIGNALS
Washington mulls further limiting China research
Many US researchers see academic partnerships with Chinese researchers as crucial diplomacy and good science. But China has cracked down on foreign researchers in the country and limits its scientists’ travel abroad, as Semafor previously reported. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has continued Trump-era limits on the influence China has in American research. The big concern is espionage, which some worry would give Beijing sensitive American technology and science for use in military development, Science Magazine reported. But some academics argue the rules are unfair to Chinese academics working in the US and difficult to adhere to without more resources.
Huawei still has a situationship with Europe
Huawei has had more success funding research in Europe, though many EU officials share US security concerns. A June 2023 Financial Times report found the EU backed Huawei’s participation in 11 projects as part of the Horizon Europe program, which is designed to modernize the bloc’s telecommunications infrastructure, particularly in cloud computing, 6G, and AI. Brussels has since moved to restrict Huawei’s participation, but individual member states can still choose to use Huawei technology, according to Science Business. For example, France has a Huawei factory under construction and set to open this year — even though prosecutors raided the firm’s Paris offices on suspicion of corruption and influence meddling in February.
Is Huawei too big to stop?
When Huawei was blacklisted in the US in 2019, its revenue and exports plummeted. But the company “has shown a vampiric ability to come back from the dead in the years since.” Part of the reason may be the US attention is focused on other Chinese companies, especially ByteDance. And some key regions, including South America, have largely embraced Huawei to build critical infrastructure, American Foreign Policy fellow David Wilezol said. Ultimately, Chinese trade organizations seem optimistic Huawei will prevail. And certainly, Huawei has since built a (so-far) successful EV division, and its China-made computing chips are becoming increasingly powerful, boosting its AI efforts. Huawei is pursuing “long-termism, not opportunism,” wrote the Shenzhen Infrastructure Engineering Corps, a Chinese trade association, and “only long-termists have no opponents.”