Hundreds of American and allied companies and universities collaborated with Chinese defense institutes engaged in developing advanced military capabilities for Beijing’s military, according to an Air Force think tank report made public Monday.
The cooperation with Chinese military laboratories and companies included 731 exchanges or contacts from 2015 to 2025 across a wide range of technologies key to the People’s Liberation Army’s advanced weapons development, according to the report by the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
The detailed 236-page report lists sensitive U.S. and allied technologies discussed during conferences or developed during joint research projects that could have assisted the Chinese military.
Military-related cooperation between the U.S. and Western institutions and China, as identified in the report, included know-how in hypersonic missile propulsion, explosives, submarine acoustics and hydrodynamics, aircraft controls, jet engine development, ballistic missile penetration, anti-electronic jamming, composite materials for spacecraft and advanced semiconductor fabrication.
Other sensitive technology cooperation included work on precision guidance and targeting, advanced radar, and the development of anti-radar stealth for surface ships.
The disclosure of the Chinese defense technology collaboration follows the recent publication of a White House National Security Science and Technology Strategy, which warns that China is stealing large amounts of U.S. technology.
The strategy calls for preventing adversaries such as China from building up their military and intelligence services by restricting access to U.S. markets and investments.
“In particular, China’s military-civil fusion strategy aims to orient private commercial activity and even investment by U.S. persons toward achieving global technological dominance, including through coercive industrial policies and state security tools,” the strategy said.
The White House National Security Strategy, published in December, also stated that the United States was seeking to prevent “grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage,” with China a major violator.
Major U.S. companies linked to the Air Force report on questionable cooperation included Honeywell, Bell Labs, Cisco, IBM, Intel and Pratt & Whitney, the report said.
Numerous U.S. universities, including many engaged in advanced technology research, were cited as helping to advance Chinese military programs. They included Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton.
“Needless to say, such interactions between Western research institutions and [People’s Republic of China] military research labs [are] at the very least problematic, and at most an urgent security concern,” the report stated.
“While some instances described herein are more troubling than others, even the seemingly less problematic cases provide opportunities for the gathering of valuable technology and knowledge by actors whose main goal is to develop new technologies for the PRC military.”
In all, 426 institutions, including 123 American entities, are listed by name as having engaged with Chinese military or defense institutes until at least 2025.
The study could not determine whether the cooperation had ended or was continuing, the report stated, adding that it was not intended as evidence of intentional wrongdoing by any listed institution.
The report was based on a study of 98 Chinese national military research laboratories and public records of the labs’ contacts with foreign universities, companies and research labs from 2015 to 2025.
Most of the cooperation involved conferences or events at Chinese defense and military labs or universities, as well as long-term research and training between Chinese military facilities and U.S. and Western entities, including some joint research centers.
The use of conferences — often disguised by organizers to hide involvement by Chinese military and defense units — reveals “a potential soft spot in Western efforts to limit knowledge transfer to PRC military research entities that may have been overlooked to this point,” the report said.
Joint research identified in the report as potentially beneficial to the Chinese military included a military aviation company collaborating with the U.S. company Honeywell to develop aircraft control systems.
Columbia and Princeton universities, and the router giant Cisco, helped a Chinese military communications laboratory, the report said.
A PLA communications lab boasted of cooperating with U.S., European and Asian companies Intel, Siemens, Nokia, DoCoMo, National Semiconductor, Philips, France Telecom, LG and STMicroelectronics, the report said.
“Of particular concern, the data revealed numerous interactions with U.S. and foreign military academies, defense companies, and defense research institutions,” the report said.
Some U.S. government agencies were also involved in defense cooperation, including the Energy Department, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Army Research Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.
Of particular concern were conferences involving advanced military development.
For example, in 2021, China’s Defense S&T Key Lab of Hypersonic Ramjet Technology, a military lab working on hypersonic missiles, held a conference with experts from Oklahoma State University, Rutgers University, along with academics from Canada, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden and Britain.
China has deployed hypersonic missiles that can defeat U.S. missile defenses with high-speed maneuvering warheads, according to the Pentagon.
Ramjet technology is considered next-generation technology for hypersonics.
Honeywell was identified in the report as helping the Chinese defense sector with fly-by-wire aircraft control and integration technology with potential military applications in 2018, and with advanced avionics technology in 2024.
In 2021, the University of Tennessee Knoxville participated in a research collaboration with the Defense S&T Key Lab of Ballistic Missile Penetration Technology, a military lab that develops technologies to defeat adversary air and missile defense systems. The lab is part of the PLA Rocket Force Research Academy.
Another 2021 conference in China was hosted by a PLA lab that conducts research on acoustics for military submarines and other underwater vehicles. It included representatives from nine U.S. universities.
Cisco took part in a PLA-hosted collaboration in 2019 to harden electronic communications against jamming, a technology with direct military applications, the report said.
Many of the military institutes involved in the exchanges were placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List of banned Chinese military entities.
American universities and companies had the most interaction, with 204 of 731 recorded exchanges, the report said.
Other nations with high numbers of interactions with the Chinese defense and military research system included Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, South Korea and Singapore.
Chinese military elements involved in the cooperation included the PLA Strategic Support Force, which was involved in cyberwarfare, space warfare and information warfare. The force was reorganized in 2024.
Another key PLA facility involved in the cooperation was the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, a key player in the PLA’s hypersonic missile research, and the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, which is working on PLA space warfare.
Other PLA research centers identified in the report as benefiting from the decade of exchanges were the Academy of Military Sciences, the Naval Research Academy, the PLA Center for Disease Control, the People’s Police University, and the Rocket Force Research Academy.
The report listed details on 131 instances of exchanges involving sensitive, dual-use civilian-military or solely military technology.
Chinese civilian institutes also took part, and under Beijing’s civilian-military fusion program, they are required to assist PLA military development.
Those listed in the report include state-owned Aero Engine Corp. of China, Aviation Industry Corp. of China and China Academy of Engineering Physics.
AVIC is the primary warplane and missile manufacturer, and CAEP is tasked with developing China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arms.
The report, “The Global Footprint of China’s Defense Labs: Contacts and Collaborations With Foreign Institutions,” was produced by contractor BluePath Labs and written by BluePath China affairs specialist Matthew Bruzzese.
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