• Chinese leaders have long viewed advanced science and technology (S&T) as key to China’s comprehensive national power and sought to acquire it through licit and illicit means from developed countries like the United States. Since the 1990s, China’s government has built a sprawling ecosystem of structures, programs, and incentives to coopt and exploit Chinese students and scholars for the S&T they acquire abroad.

• This ecosystem sponsors promising Chinese students and scholars at U.S. and other foreign universities, incentivizes their return to China for the long term, and employs transnational organizations to channel S&T know-how from those remaining abroad back to mainland China. The purpose of this ecosystem is to leverage the resources of American universities to provide the technology and talent Beijing needs to win its national competition with the United States.

• Many programs associated with Beijing’s S&T transfer ecosystem—including scholarships to study abroad, talent recruitment plans, and entrepreneurship parks—contribute to China’s military-civil fusion strategy by collecting specific technologies and know-how that improve the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and advance the goals” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

• The overall population of Chinese students and research scholars in the United States rose dramatically from around 68,000 in the 2006–2007 school year to about 370,000 in January 2020, a trend driven by China’s modernization policies and reinforced by U.S. policy decisions and the interests of colleges and universities in diversifying their revenue sources in the wake of the Great Recession. Approximately 130,000 of these students and scholars are pursuing graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Chinese students and scholars, who constitute roughly a third of all foreign students in the United States, have made significant contributions to academia and the U.S. economy. The majority of Chinese students and scholars who come to the United States engage in legitimate academic activities and are part of the cultural exchange that undergirds U.S. influence in the world. However, a minority of undetermined size participates in China’s technology transfer apparatus and supports a system antithetical to U.S. national security interests.

• Fewer than five percent of visa applications flagged as technology transfer risks are ultimately denied. U.S. agencies involved in screening for illicit technology transfer continually struggle with analyst shortages and high backlogs of analytical reviews assessing technology transfer risk. Moreover, the existence of interagency concern about possible transfer of sensitive technologies is not always a legal basis for denying applications.

• U.S. law does not account for the global and increasingly integrated nature of China’s technology acquisition architecture or its shift toward prioritizing licit transfer of S&T knowledge. The Chinese government aggressively seeks to acquire scientific knowledge, technical processes, and expertise considered “fundamental research” because of its potential applications to commercial and military technologies. U.S. law permitting the legal transfer of this knowledge is predicated on potentially outdated assumptions that do not consider the increasingly close involvement of both U.S. and Chinese academia in sensitive research.

• The scope and voracity of the Chinese government’s S&T acquisition and exploitation ecosystem has concerning implications for the United States. When Chinese students and scholars trained at U.S. universities return to China to commercialize research they developed overseas, U.S. firms that would have employed them lose a first-mover opportunity, and the U.S. institutions that funded them—including U.S. taxpayers—are deprived of a return on their investment. More worryingly, because Beijing has promulgated a strategy of “military-civil fusion” and dictated that those with S&T expertise should serve the cause of national rejuvenation, state-affiliated institutions likely absorb and leverage this expertise to improve China’s military capabilities and further the interests of the CCP.