Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who serves as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, disclosed on Sunday that American taxpayers are “funding thousands of Chinese experiments with direct applications to the Chinese military.”
Writing in The National Interest, Rubio, one of the Republicans at the forefront of confronting Communist China along with Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, mentioned a report that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) had given $30 million in artificial intelligence research grants to a Chinese scientist at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Rubio pointed out that the Beijing Institute of Technology works to create next-generation weapons for the Communist Chinese Army.
But then Rubio submitted new evidence: The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) found that U.S. taxpayers funded the aforementioned experiments. “Their findings note more than 5,000 instances of research collaboration between the DoD’s funding agencies and Chinese entities between 2019 and 2024,” he wrote.
He continued:
NCIS specifically records eighty-one collaborations with China’s nuclear weapon research and development complex, hundreds of collaborations with the “Seven Sons of National Defense” and the “Seven Sons of Ordnance Industry”—China’s premier defense industry-affiliated universities—and seventeen collaborations with China’s National University of Defense Technology—the People’s Liberation Army’s premier scientific research institute.
The experiments “have focused on facial recognition, stealth technology, underwater acoustics, explosives, semiconductors, cryptography, cybersecurity, and data mining,” Rubio asserted, adding, “Such research, facilitated by our own government, may have already given Beijing an edge in key areas of twenty-first-century warfare. … China now has nearly unfettered access to America’s fundamental research due to a lack of prohibitions in grant language pertaining to co-authorship and collaboration.”
Rubio and Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) plan to introduce the FORTIFY U.S. Research Act “to safeguard taxpayer-funded research and close loopholes that have enabled our adversaries to exploit it,” he stated.
Rubio declared that such legislation is “what the American people require to begin restoring their faith in our institutions. The longer we wait to act, the more that faith will fade—and the more its fading will be justified.”
Rubio’s efforts to combat the pernicious influence of Communist China have included the following: In March 2023, he and Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst introduced the No Funds for Enablers of Adversarial Propaganda Act to deny federal funds to any individual or entity that had an agreement, partnership, or advertisement with TikTok. In August 2023, he called for banning TikTok in an opinion piece.
Last month, Rubio introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to expose the corruption of the Chinese Communist government and its leadership.
The bill, titled the “Confronting CCP Malign Influence Act of 2024,” would require the Director of National Intelligence to “prepare and make available a report on the wealth and corrupt activities of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and for other purposes.”
“Our nation’s greatest adversary is Communist China and the American people must realize the complex reality a new world order, led by Beijing, would pose. Whether it be through economic, social, or military coercion, we are seeing an increased effort from China to displace our nation as the world’s leading power,” Rubio stated.
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