Moolenaar, Walberg Call on Duke to Terminate China-Based Campus Over National Security Risks (House Select Committee on China)

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Moolenaar, Walberg Call on Duke to Terminate China-Based Campus Over National Security Risks

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) and House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) are calling on Duke University President Vincent Price to end the Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in China. Through its partnership with Chinese entities, DKU enabled the CCP to access sensitive U.S. technology, including Department of Defense-funded research into advanced camera systems—now used to surveil Tiananmen Square and track millions of people across China. The university has also allowed American students to be exploited in CCP propaganda and showcases imagery of DKU students participating in military-style training on its website. This partnership raises serious concerns about research security, academic freedom, technology transfer, and the manipulation of U.S. students for authoritarian purposes. In their letter, Moolenaar and Walberg write: “DKU, established in 2018 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), now enrolls over 3,000 students across undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs and specializes in high-technology fields with direct military applications, including data science, artificial intelligence, and materials science. As part of these programs, many DKU students spend time at Duke University, gaining access to federally funded U.S. research. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) well-documented efforts to exploit academic openness, this partnership creates a direct pipeline between U.S. innovation and China’s military-industrial complex…" “…Students were coached to recite “I love China” in Mandarin on camera, while others were repeatedly pressed to “sa[y] what they wanted [students] to say” about Chinese climate policies. Students described feeling “used” as part of a “traveling circus” that was “paraded in front of local press”—their faces later appearing on state media. This was not education but exploitation: a calculated component of Xi Jinping’s “50,000 Initiative” with “no genuine cultural exchange.” Your university’s partnership with Wuhan University directly facilitated the use of these American students as pawns for CCP propaganda." Additional Background: DKU was established as a joint institute between Duke and Wuhan University in 2018.  Wuhan University conducts research in at least five designated defense research areas, trains People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cyber warfare specialists, and plays a central role in China’s Beidou satellite system, which supports missile guidance and military intelligence operations. In February, Duke student Jacqueline Cole wrote an article for the North Carolina news site The Assembly detailing how she and her fellow students were used for CCP propaganda purposes during a DKU-sponsored trip to China. Finally, in a report released in September of 2024, titled “CCP on the Quad,” the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee listed 21 American universities that have STEM focused joint institutes with Chinese universities. The report identified concerns about Defense Department funded research furthering the PRC's national security goals in areas including high-performance explosives, drone operation networks, nuclear and high-energy physics, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and hypersonics. So far, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California -Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Oakland University are universities named in the report that have ended their joint institutes.