U.S. government labs collaborated with Chinese military research centers, new report says

Several U.S. government research agencies — including the Energy Department and the Air Force Research Laboratory — took part in scientific exchanges with Chinese military labs over the past decade, according to a report released Monday by the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.

The 236-page report found 731 contacts between 2015 and 2025 involving Western institutions and 98 Chinese national military research laboratories. Beyond the federal labs, the Army Research Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation were also named.

The exchanges touched on sensitive fields such as hypersonic missile propulsion, submarine acoustics, jamming-resistant communications and stealth technology for ships, the report said.

In all, 426 institutions were listed, including 123 American entities such as Honeywell, Cisco and universities including Harvard and Stanford. The report said it could not determine whether the cooperation had ended, and it did not accuse any institution of intentional wrongdoing.

Still, the report’s author, Matthew Bruzzese, warned that such contact with Chinese military labs is “at the very least problematic, and at most an urgent security concern.” Mr. Bruzzese wrote the report for contractor BluePath Labs.

The findings follow a White House national security strategy warning that China’s military-civil fusion strategy aims to steer private commercial activity — and even investment by U.S. persons — toward global technological dominance.

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• Hundreds of American and allied institutes helped Chinese military labs