House CCP Committee Launches Probe of University’s Hypersonic-Research Contract

T he House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is investigating a New York university’s Pentagon contract for hypersonic-weapons research and its simultaneous partnership with a Chinese military-linked university, National Review has learned.

Yesterday, Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), the panel’s chairman, sent letters about the matter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the president of Alfred University, which holds a $13.5 million Pentagon research contract focused on materials used in hypersonic missiles. That contract, Alfred’s Confucius Institute, and the university’s partnership with the China University of Geosciences are at the center of the controversy, according to the letters, which were reviewed by NR.

While Confucius Institutes — Chinese government-funded language-learning centers — have come under fire for their role in promoting Beijing’s narratives on American campuses, the House committee’s investigation reveals what might be an even bigger danger posed by the Institutes: their potential to connect sensitive U.S. research universities with Chinese military-linked labs.

“It is not a secret that the CCP uses Confucius Institutes to project ‘soft power,’ but it’s time to shed light on how the CCP also uses these institutes to build Chinese ‘hard power’ weapons that would be used against Americans in a future conflict,” Gallagher told National Review. “I look forward to hearing promptly from DOD and Alfred University on what they are doing to ensure American research security remains intact and that American taxpayer dollars aren’t used to fuel the CCP’s military advancement.”

A small school in upstate New York, Alfred is known for its program in ceramics. That specialization led to a five-year research contract with the U.S. Army Capabilities Development Command and the Army Research Laboratory.

“Research will focus on improving the performance of ceramic materials used in weapons (i.e., cruise missiles), which must be able to withstand the extreme temperatures that result from traveling at hypersonic speeds. Due to their high-temperature performance, toughness, and light weight, ceramic materials are a necessary component of hypersonic weapons systems,” Alfred University president Mark Zupan explained in a May 2022 blog post announcing the contract. In addition to that $13.5 million contract, Alfred received a separate $4 million U.S. Army contract in 2022 for another project involving ceramics and hypersonic technology.

Meanwhile, from 2009, when Alfred’s Confucius Insitute was established, to 2021, Alfred had received just over $540,000 from the Chinese government nonprofit that runs Confucius Institutes, according to a report released by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies that year. Alfred’s Confucius Institute is at the center of the probe as Gallagher seems to suspect that it might be the entity that connected Alfred with the China University of Geosciences, which hosts a key research lab that provides training in “military geology” focused on the use of geology in warfare, according to FDD. Gallagher wrote in his letter to Zupan that the Chinese government uses Confucius Institutes to pair U.S. universities with Chinese universities that hold similar research focuses in sensitive areas.

The letter to Austin shows that Gallagher is investigating how the contracts were awarded in the first place, considering a 2021 law that prohibits the Pentagon from awarding contracts to universities with Confucius Institutes. Although that prohibition takes effect this October, the five-year Alfred contract runs through 2027, raising the possibility that the Pentagon used a waiver in the law to award the contract.

A Pentagon spokesperson only told National Review that the Defense Department would respond to the letter as appropriate, declining to answer questions about whether it issued a waiver to Alfred. In his letter to Austin, Gallagher requested a briefing on the matter.

In April, Representative Jim Banks criticized the Pentagon’s newly released guidelines on waiving the research-funding prohibition, arguing that the guidelines are too broad and effectively serve to legitimize the Confucius Institutes on American campuses. Tightening the 2021 measure is expected to be a focus for some lawmakers in this year’s annual defense-policy bill.

“U.S. universities are currently under no legal or regulatory obligation to disclose any details regarding their Chinese academic and research partnerships, nor are they required to coordinate their partnership activities with federal or local authorities, even when these U.S. schools receive millions of dollars from the Defense Department to work on sensitive research.,” said Craig Singleton, the FDD senior fellow who wrote the 2021 report initially identifying Alfred’s China ties.

Alfred University did not respond to National Review’s questions about the issues raised by Gallagher.