Even Lenin, who supposedly said that the capitalists “will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” might be surprised at this one.
An American high school is collaborating with the effort of Chinese institutions to create STEM talent pipelines modeled on its elite program.
National Review’s new reporting on a collaboration between Tsinghua University and Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Va., reveals that Chinese educators are trying to replicate — or, as administrators from the high school put it, “clone” — the school across China.
The Northern Virginia high school, which is renowned for its emphasis on science and technology education, per NR’s reporting received funding from Tsinghua via a nonprofit group affiliated with Thomas Jefferson. In exchange for that funding, Tsinghua and related China-based organizations repeatedly visited the school and received from its administrators a how-to guide on replicating the model in China.
Obviously, no American educational institution should be helping Tsinghua and its affiliates educate prospective Chinese university students in disciplines with possible defense applications.
A recent investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee reveals that joint research partnerships between U.S. universities and Chinese-military-linked schools have enabled the transfer of tech with military applications.
According to that report, Tsinghua is one of a few dozen universities that is overseen by the Chinese government’s State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense — an office with the stated goal of developing more advanced equipment for the People’s Liberation Army.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, has also designated Tsinghua as “high risk” for its role in defense research on everything from air-to-air missiles to materials science. It hosts several defense-research labs. It has also hosted students from a university for the PLA’s rocket force.
The concern here isn’t so much that a high school could be sending sensitive research to China as that this school is helping China’s defense establishment develop a talent pipeline based on its own proven model.
American universities are contributing enough to research efforts by Chinese universities as it is. The 113-page congressional report featured six case studies, but the committees also identified a total of 21 joint research institutes involving Chinese universities that are tied to China’s defense bureaucracy.
These partnerships have facilitated the Chinese military-civil research system’s advancements in nuclear weapons technology, artificial intelligence, advanced lasers, semiconductors, and robotics.
Unfortunately, the Department of Education is asleep at the switch, and Thomas Jefferson is doing its best to throw up barriers to obtaining documents about its activities. In other words: It’s time for Congress to open another investigation.